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Rural social problems 





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RURAL 
SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


The Century Rural Life Books 
C. J. Gatrin, Editor 


RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN 


THE WOMAN ON THE FARM 
Mary Meex ATKESON 


LAND: ITS SOCIAL ECONOMY 
Cuarites Leste STEWART 


THE FARMER’S STANDARD OF 
| LIVING 
E. L. Kirxpatricx 


RURAL MUNICIPALITIES 
Tueopore B. Manny 


RURAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 
Cart C. Taytor 


THE FARMER’S TOWN 
J. H. Kors 


THE SUBURBAN TREND 
H. Pavut Dovetass 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 
Warren H. Witson 





RURAL 
SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


BY é 
CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN 


In Charge of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, 
United States Department of Agriculture; One Time 
Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics 
in the University of Wisconsin 


Author of *‘Rurat Lire’’ 





THE CENTURY CO. 
New York and London 


Copyright, 1924, by 
THE CENTURY Co. 


PRINTED IN VU. &. A. 


To My Friend 
DR. HENRY C. TAYLOR 
Who, Standing in the Midst of Farm Life, Took Up 
the Study of the Farmer’s Economie Problem 
Because He Felt That the American Farmer Is 
Entitled to an American Standard of Living 


This Book is Dedicated 


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PREFACE 


The human element in the problem of agriculture and 
country life is the theme of this book. Up to the present 
time rural humanism has been outgeneraled by the 
forces of rural finance, which keep promising that all 
the good things of life will come of their own accord to 
rural society, if only everybody will turn in and make 
agriculture a paying business. The hour is coming, 
however, when the humanizing forces inherent in agri- 
eulture and country life will break the leash and strike 
out to find the way to modernized living; for they are 
now pretty well aware that agriculture will never be 
prosperous enough out of its own coffers, however well 
filled they may be, to guide farm men, women, and 
children to goals of life which require ideals of living to 
comprehend. 

This volume is written in anticipation of that hour of 
a courageous rural humanism. It is intended as a fore- 
book to the Century Rural Life Books. Each chapter is 
viewed as an opening discussion of a topic, to be fol- 
lowed closely by a forthcoming book that will treat the 
subject of the chapter with scope. 

CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN. 
January 1, 1924. 









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CHAPTER 


I 
II 


XIII 
XIV 


XVI 
XVII 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
Tye Frontier IN Fagm Lire ..... 8 
Way Farmers Tonk as THzEy Do. .. . 12 
THe Farmer’s Stanparp of Living. . . . 33 
Some Proptems THAT ConFrront Farm Women 51 


WHERE THE Farm Faminy Trapes . . . .. 65 
LANDLORDS AND Farm TENANTS . . . . . 176 
AGRICULTURE AND High ScHoots . . . . . 93 
AGRICULTURE AND Hosprraus . ... . . . Itt 
AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES . ... . . 119 


Can THE Farm Faminty Arrorp Moprern InstTI- 
REPT TON Pe ta eee ge diatitgh GRUUHER bw Pghty ek. Ue. AMR Ee 


REPLANNING THE City AS A PLACE Not TO Live In 150 
WAR PEMDIN Gr ARMS LITHR fo) leisy Wn oc beeth Gel syhl eae OO 


MovEMENT OF POPULATION TO AND From Farms . 183 © 


Rurau Lire iw AMericAN ART. . . ... . 197 
Tue Coming Rurau Municipatity. . . . . 209 
SSVREMES OMT URAT,) LLOPEN yi (\ spel ei de nhivoh inal hy fazer 
Tue Skims: A SupmarginaL Lanp . . . . 261 


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RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 









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RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


CHAPTER I 


THE FRONTIER IN FARM LIFE 


: MERICAN agriculture and farm life are young, 


very young as races and nations reckon age. 

And this youthfulness, if overlooked, will prove 
a constant source of perplexity if not of error to him 
who, with something more than a passing glance, would 
understand farm life and its problems in America. Let 
us frankly recognize, therefore, at the very start that 
America’s three hundred years, England’s fifteen hun- 
dred years, China’s thousands of years, create differ- 
ences in their types of farm life which appear as con- 
spicuous as the dissimilarities between the child, the 
man, and the patriarch. 


THE Movine Line or FRONTIERS 
(1790-1880 a. D.) 


The childhood, so to speak, of America’s farming and 
farm life has been peculiarly like the childhood of chil- 
dren because it has been so eager, hopeful, spontaneous, 
and unrestrained. Commencing at the edge of the east- 
ern wilderness and continuing westward over new lands 

3 


4: RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


of wonderful fertility, lands virtually free to the in- 
dividual farmer who turned the first furrow, American 
farming has been carried forward by persons and classes 
of persons who lived and worked under the spell of a 
powerful emotion. This emotion was the sense or ex- 
perience of a new freedom, exemption from customary 
European restraint, the hitherto unknown feel of great 
spaces, altogether an almost boundless and unbelievable 
autonomy. To understand the inner character of the 
present American farm community, one must let his 
imagination take the journey across the American conti- 
nent, and follow step by step this three hundred years 
of rural life and labor. A volume of the United States 
Census on Population for 1880 contains maps which 
show the successive waves of advance of population 
across the American continent east to west, from 1790 
to 1880. In these maps the line running from north 
to south marking the western edge of areas containing, 
on the average, county by county, as many as two 
persons to the square mile—a line very irregular, indeed, 
as may well be imagined—is proposed as the American 
frontier line. 

This frontier line crept westward day by day, a 
few feet a day; slow like a glacier, but like a glacier ever 
moving on. During the first two hundred years the 
frontier line moved from the Atlantic coast across the 
Appalachians; during the next fifty years, half-way 
across the Mississippi Valley; the last fifty years have 
witnessed the steady movement of the frontier line clean 
across the Mississippi Valley, over the Rockies, and to 
the Pacific coast, 


THE FRONTIER IN FARM LIFE 5 


On this ever-moving frontier line were the forerunners 
of American civilization. Here the farm family faced 
the wilderness and the prairie and subdued them with 
ox and plow. Along with the farmer stood the hunter, 
trader and town builder, miner, lumberman, boatman, 
highway builder, overland carrier. As the frontier line 
moved on, a second line occupied the position left and 
began to establish and intrench more perfectly the in- 
stitutions of civilization. A third line followed the sec- 
ond, and so on until civilization itself may be said to 
have moved across the continent and taken up its fixed 
positions. 

The American historian has pointed out that democ- 
racy, all through its history on the American continent 
even up to the present time, has been characterized by 
the presence of this frontier line of adventurous souls en- 
gaged in subduing an ever new and changing type of 
land, landscape, and resources. He has stressed the 
fact that a back-flow of youthful spirit, virility, hope, 
imagination, confidence, power, has continually poured 
eastward from this ever new and spontaneous frontier, 
into the older States; and so he claims that American 
democracy has grown up under a process of inoculation 
with the serum of youth. America thus has kept re- 
juvenated and revitalized in contrast with Europear 
democracy. 

Well may the students of rural life thank the his- 
torian for this historical point of view; for now rural 
thinkers will note with more particularity what the fron- 
tier has meant in the growth of the farm community 
and rural institutions. 


6 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


Tae RATES oF DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL AND 
UrsBan LAND 


In the three-hundred-year movement and development 
of American industry, government, and life from the 
wilderness through successive frontier stages to settled 
civilized conditions, it is interesting to observe, if one 
will refer to the U. S. Census maps mentioned above, 
that the moving frontier line did nbt advance at a uni- 
form rate throughout its whole length. In fact, some 
portions moved much more rapidly than others. What 
especially stands out on the maps is that civilization 
seemed to flow around certain frontier areas, leaving 
them behind like unconquered islands of wilderness. 
Then a circular frontier line formed independent of 
the main advancing line and began to creep up and over 
each island wilderness, until in due time its conquest 
was made. This peculiar fact, namely, that the frontier — 
line has sped on at certain points and left behind, unsub- 
dued, certain areas of land, leads us to look into it more 
carefully, and to review the original situation, to see 
what really has taken place. 

An unbiased look will show that agricultural land has, 
in virtually all cases, been ‘‘left behind’’ by the moving 
frontier in a retarded frontier condition; while urban 
land has kept up with the general movement of civiliza- 
tion. That agricultural land (carrying with it farm 
organization and community life) has moved and de- 
veloped far more slowly out of wilderness conditions 
than urban land (carrying with it industrial organiza- 
tion and city life) is our observation; and that in turn 
becomes a point of departure for understanding Ameri- 


THE FRONTIER IN FARM LIFE 7 


ean farm life. It is not really surprising to find agricul- 
tural land and communities ‘‘left behind’’ in retarded 
frontier conditions, to work their way slowly out to 
modern conditions, when we reckon up carefully all the 
physical difficulties of converting the wilderness and 
bringing agricultural land—farms, highways, institu- 
tions—into adjustment to a moving civilization. Nor is 
it difficult to see how urban land, in the history of Amer- 
ica, has outstripped agricultural land in the process of 
adjustment to modern life. A bare look at the manner 
of development of each will suffice to convince one. 

The farm family has subdued its unit of agricultural 
land, with certain exceptions which need not detain us, 
single-handed. This family cut the forest, broke land, 
stumped it, organized it, built on it, made roadways. 
The unit of urban land included in village, town, or city 
is subdued in most cases, even in early times, by a labor 
force. Collective effort builds buildings, streets, and in- 
stitutions with relative rapidity. Where it takes dec- 
ades to subdue urban land and to adjust it adequately 
to the purposes of city industry and life, it takes gen- 
erations to subdue agricultural land and adjust it with 
similar adequacy to the purposes of agriculture and in- 
stitutional life. Lest the full force of this contrast may 
be unheeded, let us follow a little further the unfold- 
ing of the rural community. 


EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURAL GROUPS FROM F'RONTIER 
CONDITIONS 


A graphic picture of what occurred, humanly speak- 
ing, step by step, in the early agricultural life of 


‘ 


8 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


America would, if such a picture were possible, enable 
us to see what has led up to our present rural popula- 
tion groups. If we could reénact, as in a play, the 
slow occupancy of the agricultural land, family by 
family, we should see the justification of certain early 
groups of farm people, which have persisted in their 
original group form to our own day with small justifica- 
tion. We should see the local political group, such as 
the township, emerge from a chaos of widely separated 
farm families. Local governments these families must 
have. So the loose organization of local family units: 
over a wide spread of land naturally follows. Nothing 
like a compact village, town, or city was possible. A 
grist-mill on a flowing water-power, a sawmill per- 
chanee, established one group; a post-office established 
another; a school, a church, as occasion required, and 
convenience and immediacy dictated, determined others. 
A trading-post, a village, a town, drew farmers together 
for trade who may have belonged to several different 
school groups and two or more mill groups. The cir- 
cumstances that created the variety of various small 
groups of farm families continued for two or three gen- 
erations at first, until custom had made the groupings 
seem right, and the general acceptance of such group- 
ings became fixed in the rural and urban mind. As the 
years and generations rolled by in American history, 
farmers, having become accustomed to the frontier 
grouping and organization, began to ‘‘adjust themselves 
backward’’ to this social organization, awkward though 
it might be, without much thought of improvement, tak- 


THE FRONTIER IN FARM LIFE 9 


ing the penalty of maladjustment into their own souls 
as a matter of course. 

The rural post-office groups had names and usually 
added to themselves a few other functions and services, 
as, for example, a store, a blacksmith shop, a tannery, 
a mill. Such post-office groups did not coincide with 
the school groups necessarily, as the school was adjusted 
to the walking capacity of the small child. The church 
group was determined on a principle of religious belief 
and conduct. This required usually a new set of ter- 
ritorial limits, coinciding very rarely with other groups. 
These groups might contain as few as half a dozen 
families or as many as a hundred. The general out- 
standing characteristic of this group situation is the 
partial overlapping of several distinct social groups of 
farm families with respect to institutions of service, 
school, religion, or trade. 

It is quite as we might expect that these various groups 
have been in fluctuation, subject to considerable change 
and even decay. Rural post-offices went out of fashion. 
The groups began to decay. Trading-posts came and 
went with transport facilities. Their groups changed 
likewise. The country grist-mill, tannery, distillery, 
sawmill, declined. Their groups shifted. Schools of 
higher order came. New school communities came in. 
With shift by immigration of farm ownership from 
American to Norwegian, for example, or to other foreign 
race elements, old churches ceased, new church groups 
arose. With all the flux and change, however, the main 
characteristics continued; viz., the separateness and ter- 


10 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


ritorial confusion of groups, partially overlapping, sel- 
dom consolidating, scarcely ever achieving adequacy. 

Unless the agricultural community is to suffer inevit- 
able arrest and the continual necessity of ‘‘adjustment 
backward’’ with a consequent social penalty for being 
farmers, we must all be prepared in our minds for the 
final step in the metamorphosis of the agricultural com- 
munity from frontier organization to modern organiza- 
tion. This step may be as dramatic as the step from 
the worm to the butterfly. When the ‘‘horseless ear- 
riage’’ or the tractor took the place of the horse, there 
was no demand anywhere that the gas-driven horse 
should be made in the shape and form of an oat-and- 
hay-driven horse. When modern community organiza- 
tion displaces the farmers’ frontier type of groupings, 
we shall not be surprised to see an utter change in form 
of the organization. The modern rural store is not 
to be thought of as a better cross-roads store; the modern 
rural blacksmith shop is not to be a better cross-roads 
blacksmith shop; the modern farmers’ municipality is 
not likely to be a better township. They may all be on 
different models. We must look for forms of organiza- 
tion which are adjusted to the farmer’s economic and in- 
tellectual development, and to the needs of a modern 
American home. 


A STATEMENT OF THE RURAL PROBLEM 


The social problem of farm life as a whole may very 
well be conceived as the problem of mounting from the 
lower level of frontier organization up to the level of 
modern life and institutions. The problem in the large 


THE FRONTIER IN FARM LIFE 11 


is one of escape, escape from the menace of an arrested 
social development and of a stunted breed of society. 
The stolid peasant is a dwarf product of arrested 
gerowth. America is living in hope that its agriculture 
may escape a peasant society. 


é¢ 


CHAPTER II 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 


spects, no different from any people. They eat, 

marry, work, love children, grow old, and die like 
everybody else. Why, therefore, single them out and 
ask about their habits of thought? As if there were 
any one who did n’t know already how the farmer feels, 
thinks, and behaves in every-day life.’’ 

Yes, but does the ordinary man of the street, the 
wheat-eating man let us call him, know clear to the bot- 
tom of his soul what makes farmers feel as they do, 
think as they do, and act as they do? To know this, is 
to understand the farmer, and to understand the farmer 
is to place in the stream that flows between town and 
country the first stepping-stone to good relations with 
him. The wheat-eater, if he does not wish to be on a 
good footing with the wheat-raiser, must never attempt 
to fathom the wheat-raiser’s mind. For that way, be- 
yond a shadow of a doubt, lies friendliness to farm, 
farming, and farmer. 

Let us be bold enough to hope and take for granted 
that all wheat-eaters and cotton-wearers wish to travel 
this way of friendliness. We shall, therefore, take a 
modest look into the farmer’s mind. 


Three influences in life, we are safe in saying, strongly 
12 


P=: people,’’ it will be said, ‘‘are, in most re- 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 138 


color the way people view things; viz., their own occupa- 
tion, that is, the sort of work they do for a livelihood; 
their own residence, that is, where and under what 
conditions they live while at home; their own institu- 
tions, that is, established orders and systems to which 
they are subject from youth up. Let us consider these 
three influences in the life of the farmer, and see whether 
they do not give the clue to why farmers think as 
they do. 


FARMING THE ONLY OCCUPATION OF ITs KIND 


The peculiar, even unique, character of farming— 
or of agriculture, if one prefers a term of noble mien— 
rows on the student as he goes further and further into 
its history. The unlikeness of the plow to the anvil, 
no less than that of the wheat-harvesting combine to 
the printing-press, tells the whole story of peculiar farm 
tools and machines. The dissimilar muscle-action of 
the farmer, moreover, in holding the plow from sun 
to sun, moving over many a mile in the open, as com- 
pared with that of the dentist, tools in hand, standing 
indoors all day by the upturned open mouth of his 
patient, has wrought upon the farmer’s frame a differ- 
ent type of body from the dentist’s. 

But the unique character of farming, much as the 
tools of farming differ from all other tools and much 
as the muscular actions of farmers differ from the 
muscular actions of workers in all other occupations— 
the uniqueness of farming, I say, stands out pre- 
eminently in the products of the farm. Let us look at 


14 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the products of industry and compare them with the 
products of the farm and try to estimate the peculiarity 
of the farmer’s occupation. 

Leather and shoes, steel and rails, paper and books, 
flour and bread, lumber and houses—can you see them 
in the making? Is one shoe planted and does a pair of 
shoes come forth? Is a house set into the ground and 
do three houses spring up? Are books sown broadcast 
and is a library harvested? That would be a miracle, 
indeed. 

You see rather patterns, models, specifications. You 
see steel red-hot, rolled and flattened, rolled and 
lengthened, shaped, and cut to measure. You see the 
builder measure, cut, fit, put together, nail fast, piece on 
piece, just as the working plan demands. The steel 
rail emerges as the will of the workers wished. The 
house arises as willed and desired. The shoes are 
stitched as designed. Books are planned and made to 
meet the plan. Industry uses lifeless, will-less, inert 
materials for its products; and so the worker, the will 
behind the tool and machine, is habituated to this ruth- 
less shaping of matter into product according to 
design. 

And the farmer and his product? Thirty kernels of 
wheat like this kernel; a hundred clover plants like 
this clover plant; six hogs like this hog. 

Yes, the farmer has his model, his pattern, his specifi- 
cations. But he puts his wheat model into the ground, 
and waits, biding the season of growth. Then he plucks 
his thirty kernels grown to be like the model. The 
thirty are kin to the one. The six hogs are kin to 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 15 


the one hog. Live beings the farmer makes. Lifeless 
things the industrialist constructs. 

This means that farming is the only occupation of its 
kind; and the peculiarity is more pronounced in the 
product, if that were possible, than in the process or in 
the tools. 


Farm Home UNLIKE Any OTHER HoMEs 


The farm home in America has three decided pe- 
culiarities; it is in sight of or close to the field work and 
chores of the farmer; it is separated by considerable 
distances from the homes of other families; its neighbors, 
however near or far away they may be, are also farmers. 
A look at these three circumstances of farm life will 
discover to the thoughtful observer how farmers in 
America come to think as they do. 

The American frontier farmer had to live on his 
land in touch with his fields. He wanted to be close 
to his animals to protect them. He felt safer about his 
growing crops, if he could keep them in sight. Then, 
too, he was a time-saver, and did not care to be going 
long distances back and forth to work. But above every- 
thing else the American farmer knew of no better place 
to live on than the spot close to the land that was his, 
close to the animals he was used to, in sight of the 
erowing plants he was coaxing. This sweep of the eye 
over his domain after work is done, this deep draft of 
satisfaction in the midst of his pet treasures, his prop- 
erties, is unique. It is the landsman’s life. 

The American farmer never locks his office door and 


16 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


goes home to his family to forget his work. His work 
things—his crops, his animals—why, they are alive. 
They are, as it were, a part of his family. Nearness to 
work is of the essence of farming. The real farmer 
never dismisses his lambs and calves and colts for the 
night, any more than he does his children when he puts 
them to bed and tucks them in. He is on eall. How 
different it is with the banker, merchant, doctor, car- 
penter, artisan! 

The trader on the frontier lived in his store. The 
doctor had his office in his house. Craftsmen of all sorts 
in early days economized by living with their craft. 
But those days for American industry are gone. Only 
remnants of such pioneering are seen here and there. 
Pity grips the heart when one discovers a family in 
village, town, or city, living darkly in the rear of a 
shop, over or under a store, in the midst of garments in 
the making to sell. 

No, city industry can be put under lock and key. 
The worker can go home, out of sight of work, out of 
hearing of machines, buzzers, and bells, and forget his 
tasks with satisfaction. The joy of dismissing city 
work at sunset, retreating to the family, resting apart 
and away, thrills banker and spinner alike. Is the 
reason the speed and strain of city work? Is it the 
inert product of industry? Is it the monotonous spe- 
cialization upon one thing? At any rate, city industry 
is not to be lived with. Fortunate the city worker who 
can put miles between his work -and his home! But 
happy the farmer who lives where his eye reaches every 
nook and corner of his farm! 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 17% 


The second peculiar feature of the farm home is its 
distance from neighbors. The very commonplaceness of 
this circumstance is perplexing to one who tries to see 
all the results that flow from it. 

Although a farm home may have two neighbor homes 
lying within the distance of one mile, the likelihood is 
that the greater number of neighbors live at least three 
miles away, out of sight and hearing. This situation 
approaches a condition of solitary living. At least we 
ean understand the situation better, if—granted that 
it is an extreme illustration—we try to analyze the effect 
upon a single person or a single family of having an 
abode so far from people as to be living in an atmosphere | 
of uninterrupted privacy. 

The key to understanding such a life is that the life 
is all one’s own. Whatever the advantages may be of 
having perfect freedom from other wills, that advantage 
comes to the solitary. On the other hand, whatever 
loss comes from having nothing added to life from the 
soul of another person, that loss must be accepted with 
the advantage. The family that lives alone lives its own 
life in its own way. It is strong in that it is a solid 
unit; it is weak in that it ig federated with no allies. 
The nearer the farm family comes to this solitary life, 
the more nearly it takes the loss and gain of absolute 
privacy. 

The silent, perhaps unconscious, restraint upon a 
person or a family having close neighbors, and many 
close neighbors indeed, is in tremendous contrast with 
the silent unconscious freedom of the recluse. The con- 
straint put upon every member of a family by the pres- 


18 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


ence for a single day even of a stranger in the home is 
almost painful, so aware is everybody of the visitor. 
But the restraint of near neighbors in a town, although 
second nature and hardly recognized, is none the less 
actual and powerful. This type of restraining and con- 
straining influence for good or for evil is of a piece 
with society itself. The townsman lives not his own 
life in his own way, but he lives the life of others; while 
the American farm family, more or less, it must be con- 
fessed, lives its own kind of life. 

The third peculiar circumstance about the farm home 
is that farmers have only farmers for neighbors. It 
takes a little imagination to get the full force of this 
fact. In America farmers are, broadly speaking, in 
groups together. Farmers live together as pines grow 
together in pine forests, spared the presence of other 
kinds of trees. 

But bankers for neighbors have physicians, mer- 
chants, contractors, real-estate brokers, and the like. 
In terms of forests, city people live like a jungle of all 
kinds of trees and vines. One can only begin to real- 
ize how peculiar this fact is when he asks himself what 
would happen to American democracy if all the barbers 
in America lived in barber groups, all hardware mer- 
chants in hardware groups, plumbers in plumber 
groups, lawyers in attorney groups, clergy in ministe- 
rial groups, and so on to the end of the chapter? The 
bare statement of this question shows what an eccentric 
fact, especially in a great democracy like ours, is this 
fact of the segregation of farmers off by themselves in 
their every-day home life. 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 19 


RurAu InNstTituTIons Cast IN A PEecuLiAR Mop 


The farmer’s private property is land in stretched-out 
acres. He has a few buildings and some goods, of 
course, but land is the type. The city man’s private 
property is buildings and goods. He has a few square 
feet of land, of course, but buildings and goods are the 
type. 

Farm tenancy, a relationship between the landowner 
and the landless man, is quite different from city ten- 
ancy, a relationship between a building owner and a 
building-less man. 

The farm family, so far as the law of the family 
relationship is concerned, is identical with the city 
family; but many colorful differences exist, growing 
out of the peculiarities in respect to occupation and 
residence. The family on the farm is a workaday part- 
nership between husband, wife, and children in the same 
business enterprise. In the city family, if other members 
than the husband are at work, they are usually in other 
businesses. The city wife, however, is seldom more 
than a home-maker. She may, if her surplus energy 
permits, crave an outlet in some career, or in some 
minor task, at least, which shall take her out of her 
home for a respite. But seldom does she find this con- 
genial task or career in business or in a work which 
gives financial returns. It comes rather, when it comes 
at all, in charity, in church relations, in social fune- 
tions, except of course in the marginal family where 
the wife is breadwinner and home-maker, too. 

Farm children are a financial asset to the family, 


20 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


because there are forms of work in the farm enterprise 
suited to their years. The city child is a financial ha- 
bility. So the city home contains fewer children than 
the farm home. 

In giving children a productive value and in furnish. 
ing the wife a business interest, the farm furnishes a 
family motive without equal in city life. 

Rural local government is so unlike village, town, 
or city government that in comparison the farm com- 
munity seems to run along without government. The 
tax-receipts in the farmer’s drawer prove that there 
is a government; but the evidences are few that farm 
life is under a strict system of control, guidance, in- 
spection, protection by officers of law. 

The country school is as yet typically a one-room, one- 
teacher, ungraded school. The country church is a 
preaching-place, and so typically an auditorium. The 
farmer’s trading-post is still in many parts of the United 
States a single country store, or a small hamlet provided 
with a store or two and a repair-shop or two. 

It is unnecessary to call to mind further examples of 
farmers’ institutions in order to give evidence of their 
peculiar nature. 

If one would honestly understand the farmer and his 
children, he should go to the very bottom of these three 
influences—namely, farming, farm home, and farm in- 
stitutions—which appear to be peculiar to such an out- 
standing degree, and discover how they color the far- 
mer’s habits of thought and feeling. Let us briefly 
undertake to sketch some of the paths the farmer travels 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 21 


in his thinking, paths which lead directly from these 
three circumstances in his life. 


PECULIAR TRAITS oF MInp THE RESULT oF FARM 
EXPERIENCE 


If it is true that ‘‘as a man thinketh’’ so is 
he, equally is it true that as a man is so thinketh he. 
That is, experience makes the stuff man is and out of 
which his thoughts flow; and a peculiar life and work 
experience builds up a peculiar man whose habits of 
thought have a peculiar color. We are prepared, at 
this point of our discussion, then, to find the American 
farmer to some degree a man unlike other men, with a 
cast of thought peculiarly his own. If possible, let us 
try to catch in phrase some of the traits of the farmer’s 
mind which are referable to his life and labors. 

If the American farmer’s occupation held undisputed 
sway over his life, he would be America’s greatest tra- 
ditionalist and conservatist. But, of course, other in- 
fluences than his business do operate upon him. Never- 
theless, he still is a great traditionalist and a great 
conservatist. 

The farmer’s first thought, however powerful his 
second. thought may be, is apt to run in this fashion: 
‘‘TIs this thing the same as we are used to? If so, it 
is good so far. If not, it is bad so far.’’ 

Being ‘‘good so far’’ is not final approval from the 
farmer, any more than being ‘‘bad so far’’ is final dis- 
approval; but being like what the farmer is used to is 
an advantage so precious that the sagacious advertiser 


22 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


to farmers of something new first of all tries to show 
that however different the thing looks, it is after all 
precisely the same as the farmer is used to. 

Why is the farmer’s first thought what it is? Sim- 
ply this. In his business life like begets like. The 
seed-corn begets corn. like the seed. The cow is like dam 
or sire. The farmer, in other words, produces things 
that are like other things. Similarity to the past is 
the basis of his success. He has built up a technic upon 
like producing like. He expects likeness, sameness, 
identity. The dissimilar breaks the thread of continu- 
ity. It is a bit of disharmony in his scheme. Differ- 
ence, unheard-of newness, must first of all prove to be 
in some sense the same as the old and well known; for in 
and of itself to be different is to be outlawed. Even if 
difference may stir his curiosity, it is at first a freak 
with him. It must be naturalized and brought into his 
system through the law of kind and kinship before he 
accepts it. 

Second thought, the effect of education and acquaint- 
ance with life in other fields, may reverse the first 
thought; but at this point will come the struggle be- 
tween what is native and what is acquired. In the 
struggle, first thought usually wins, unless second 
thought has some strong: allies. 

The farmer is, to consider another mental attitude of 
his, our original naive teleologist ; and the worker in iron 
is our original untutored materialist. 

The farmer in his trade saves a seed alive, adjusts it 
to certain forces, and then feeds the live thing and pro- 
tects it, watching, meanwhile, for it to develop by a law 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 23 


and power hidden within itself. He somehow never can 
get over this phenomenon of automatic growth. The 
doing it all by itself—the coming true to purpose, 
whether he, the farmer, wills it or not—is blind proof to 
the farmer of an intelligent, purposeful design residing 
in nature. 

This mystery of life, of growth, of reproduction, is 
the great fact envisaging his occupation. He accepts 
it, and then proceeds to adapt the idea to all the circum- 
stances of his own life as a doctrine and law of conduct. 
He expects and waits for this mysterious force to enter 
and operate in all his enterprises. 

Saving a place for fate—or, to put it differently, 
setting a limit to what the farmer can do for himself 
on account of the great part played by nature—is a 
practical resignation, here or there, of responsibility 
and a passing of the role and turn to mystery. This 
frame of mind may account, along with other reasons to 
be sure, for the failure of the old farmer type to grap- 
ple with its problems more vigorously by the method 
of collective action. 

The worker in iron shapes his product all along its 
tortuous journey. He feeds it nothing. He never 
thinks of it as alive. It is dead, insensate matter. The 
iron-master, without ruth or pity, heats, hammers, cuts, 
drills, rolls, and shapes the iron to his own design. 

It is perhaps no wonder that the iron-master, unless 
checked by experience in other ways, saves no place for 
mystery, sets no limits to his own control, and views his 
own life as one wholly to be made on the model existing 
in his own will. 


24 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


These two different habits of thought growing out of 
different experiences may serve to explain each other. 

The deliberateness and caution of the farmer are a 
proverb. Why is it so? Why is the farmer the out- 
standing example of waiting and of precaution? 

The answer is not far to seek, if it is true that experi- 
ence colors all life and thought. The farmer waits for 
his crops to grow, after he has done his part. This 
is a long wait. His unit—a year, frequently, as with 
cattle—runs into several years. It takes years, often, 
to get land into form for high production. Timeliness, 
waiting for the right time, rather than speediness, seems 
to pay him. You cannot marvel that the farmer pur- 
sues a Similar method in all his doings. He is used 
to deliberate action, has found its value, and is inclined 
to adopt it in his other enterprises. 

His caution—a certain interesting wariness in regard 
to persons, ideas, plans, indeed, or whatever the occa- 
sions that arise—is most natural. Just take a look here. 
Both heat and cold are his friends, also rain and dry- 
ness. But heat is also one of his enemies. Cold is just 
as much an enemy. Rain may drown his crops as well 
as gently water them. Drouth may shrivel, as well as 
dryness may ripen. The farmer is accustomed to gage 
his friendly allies up to the point of their double-cross- 
ing and turning enemies; and he is always prepared 
for the turn and break. This caution, this demi- 
suspicion of friend and foe, is second nature, as self-pres- 
ervation is first nature. The habit flows easily over 
into other relations of life. Just as the athlete takes 
his springy muscles with him into the amenities of the 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 25 


drawing-room—in repose if you please, but prepared 
for any emergency—so the farmer takes his caution 
with him to town. 

Farmers, perhaps because of their habit of being 
resigned to the inevitableness of physical climate which 
meets them on every side, have always seemed to accept, 
with more or less protest to be sure, the minimums of 
life—the little end, the sacrificial side, the incomplete. 
The ‘‘inferiority complex,’’ so to speak, is a habitual 
attitude with the farmer; but complicated, just as truly, 
by a peculiar superiority complex. 

Just as the farmer has always saved the littles, be- 
cause in farming there comes a use some day for almost 
any odd or end, so he has taken the ‘‘half-loaf’’ and 
prized it, rather than risk all for the ‘‘whole loaf.’’ 

This characteristic seems tied up with the whole thrift 
habit of farm people. If crops have come quarter- 
crops, they have been accepted, garnered, utilized. So 
if life has sent minimum advantages, farmers have 
pocketed them, sung a pan, and utilized them. 

Saving everything for utilization is so wrapped up 
with farming that no one can long wonder at the far- 
mer’s money thrift when he once sees what the farmer’s 
thrift experience takes him through. Cattle eat what 
is left in the fields. Hogs follow the cattle. Poultry 
follow the hogs. Every scrap of waste is put on the 
land. The tree falls. It is converted into lumber, 
posts, rails, wood, ashes. Ashes go back on the land. 
Value is attached to every little thing. Thrift is the 
outcome of this feeling of value. And, though grum- 
bling will be heard over the land like thunder in the 


26 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


mountains, the farmer folk will accept the minimums 
_ of life and be thankful. 

That the farmer is an individualist everybody has 
heard, but not everybody knows why. The farmer’s 
son at eighteen leaves the farm, goes to the city, enters 
trade, and loses his earmarks of individualism. The 
father remains on the farm, and keeps the earmarks. 
Why ? 

It is the farmer’s solitary business on the land, his 
solitary residence distant from masses of people, and 
his being set off with farmer neighbors in a class group 
—this is what accounts for it. He is left very much to 
himself and his own thoughts. When not with other 
people he is very lkely to be with his own family, 
whose policies he is accustomed to control. When with 
his own class, his farmer neighbors, the type of think- 
ing is similar to his own. The farmer thinks and makes 
up his own mind. This is because his mind does not 
clash with those of others. He has to make up his own 
mind by himself so much that he is not accustomed to the 
social process of quiet conference and modification. 
This tendency to a mind ‘‘made up,’’ closed without let 
or conference, is a trait of lonely people, and so of farm- 
ers, at least so far as they lead the lonely life. 

The pioneer farmer of America, as we have noted, 
accepted in the matter of institutions the crumbs that 
fell from the American table. The table was furnished 
with trading towns and cities: the farmer eagerly 
took up with a trade crumb, the country store. The 
table came to have graded schools and high schools: the 
erumb was a little one-teacher school. The city table 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 27 


had libraries: the crumb some States have let fall in 
these later days is a box of books, the so-called ‘‘travel- 
ing library.’’ 

What has been the effect of frontier types of institu- 
tions upon the farmer’s thought? The answer is this: 
while the crumb was better than no bread, it served to 
keep alive and intrench the peculiar traits of thought 
induced by the peculiar occupation of farming and 
by the peculiar home surroundings. Solitariness and 
detachment from the broad stream of life characterize 
the farmer’s institutions just as they do the farmer’s 
home. And, furthermore, what is particularly distress- 
ing, the farmer’s tendency to accept the inferior social 
institution, and to be resigned to the minimum, was per- 
petuated by the inferior institutions themselves. When 
social institutions are weaker than the family and the 
home, little ean be hoped from the institution to com- 
pensate for deficiencies in the family and home. The 
farmer has never been able to accumulate a surplus in 
great social institutions which in turn would give him 
and his family multiplied power in thinking. He has 
been like the man who can never save the first thousand 
dollars which shall furnish the power of capital to 
speed on his livelihood-making. Such a man is in 
bonds, fettered to the narrow ability of his own two 
hands day by day; so the farmer, unable to rear out- 
side the home great social institutions, has been re- 
stricted in his experience and thinking to the forces 
lying close within his business and home. 

Are farmers in fault because they think as they do? 
Or, indeed, are they to be praised above all other 


28 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


classes for their attitudes of mind? No, in either case. 
Their experience, day in and day out, year after year, 
will shape their thinking, just as experience does the 
thinking of other classes. Only by falling heir to new 
avenues of other experience than the routine of farm 
work and home life and the frontier rural institutions, 
can farmers undergo much change in their thinking. 

The social psychology of the farmer group, when 
compared with the social psychology of other occupa- 
tional groups, will derive such variations as it may have 
from the basic peculiarities of farming, the farm home, 
and farm institutions. It will make a book in itself to 
trace the farmer mind through the history of the farm- 
ers’ national political movements, through the history 
of the farmers’ social and economic organizations, 
through the farmers’ commodity codperatives, through 
the modern rural educational movement, and through 
the modern rural religious revival. 

The spasmodic attempts of the farmer to throw off his 
characteristic air of resignation to the minimums of so- 
cial life will, when rehearsed and examined from the 
point of view of this discussion, remarkably light up the 
struggles of the land-worker on his way to equality 
with other men. 


WHat WILL THE FARMER OF THE FUTURE THINK? 


In the previous discussions of this chapter, the farmer 
is spoken of as if all farmers were alike. The fact is that 
there are great differences in types of farmers. Not 
only are there differing types of farming, such as wheat 
farming, small-grain farming, dairy farming, live- 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 29 


stock farming, fruit farming, cotton farming, vegetable 
farming ; but what is more conspicuous, there are, within 
each so-called type of farming, farmers of a scientific 
habit of farm practice as well as farmers of a traditional 
habit of farm practice. 

Within certain types of farming, moreover, consider- 
able control of the form and substance of the farm prod- 
uct has come to be a matter of fact, at least a much 
larger control than in traditional farming. When mod- 
ern science enters that type, as it frequently does enter, 
the control becomes still greater. The result is that the 
future farmer is plainly to be a man who, though still 
engaged in growing live seeds, plants, and animals, is so 
carefully processing his breeds, feeds, and care that he 
is shaping his products up to specification, somewhat like 
the worker in steel, brass, or leather. The future 
farmer, we may confidently expect, therefore, will be 
closer to the city worker in the type of his thought than 
the farmer has ever been heretofore. 

The surfaced roadway, especially when developed 
into community systems as well as into state trunk sys- 
tems, will so reduce the distance of the farmer from 
other people as largely to overcome the isolation of the 
farmer’s family in residence. Farmers living on a sur- 
faced highway five miles distant from their trading 
place are only ten minutes away from town. They are 
nearer the town bank, the town opera-house, the town 
church, or town school than the merchant living on the 
edge of his town was in the days when the automobile 
was very little in evidence. This new farmer is certain 
to be more like other people because his residence is only 


30 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


ten minutes from everybody living within five miles on 
surfaced roads. ; 

The complete trading town is beginning to replace the 
country store and hamlet; the large-scale school is dis- 
placing slowly the little district school; the country high 
sehool and the village high school are giving a better ed- 
ucational chance to farm children; the rural community 
house is being added to farm community life; the com- 
modity cooperative unit is slowly entering the farm com- 
munity; country parks, athletic fields, picnic grounds, 
recreation swimming-pools, are an addition to country 
life. The new type of larger, better adjusted institution 
already to be found in every State is expanding the new 
farm community. 

These newer institutions are not merely the result of 
more prosperous days in agriculture. They are the out- 
come of social perception, ambition, comparison, on the 
part of certain more favorably circumstanced commu- 
nities. They have come from much preaching, much dis- 
cussion, fine leadership. A new type of farmer will 
grow up in the midst of these modern institutions. He 
will be more like other people because he will have more 
of the influences about him which have made other 
people. But the new farmer, in becoming more like 
other men, will, it is quite sure, in turn modify his 
family and community life so as to develop all the best 
there is in country life and eliminate a great deal that 
has been the curse of living in the country. 

The older farmer type thinks as he does because he 
cannot help it. The old farm and the old farm life made 
and makes the old farmer. The new farmer type, the 


WHY FARMERS THINK AS THEY DO 31 


future farmer, will think as he will because he is the re- 
sult of the new farming and the new farm community. 

It is especially important for non-farmers to go 
through an analysis of farmer thought just to get the 
contrast between, the new and the old farmer attitudes. 
It will not improve industrial life or city business to 
look upon and regard the American farmer of the near 
future as of the old type. It will help the city, how- 
ever, in regard to all city thinking on any problem in 
which the farmer is concerned, to leave a place in the 
problem for the new farmer type. 

At least fifty per cent of farm boys and girls go to 
town and city in adolescence and permanently enter in- 
dustry and professional life. Going as they do in their 
late teens, they quickly absorb the city point of view and 
industrial thinking. The folk-ways in farm life, how- 
ever, lie embedded in their character; and the antago- 
nism between town and country, farm and city, will, it is 
to be expected, greatly diminish as the new farmer sup- 
plants the old farmer. 


THe WeraAK Spot IN Our PORTRAITURE 


We have spoken as if the hoe-farmer in America were 
gone forever, and as if the machine-farmer were here to 
stay forever. We have practically assumed in our dis- 
cussion up to now that farm psychology is making an 
upward change of a permanent character. But suppose 
that the reign of the farm machine has nearly reached 
its climax already and that conditions are about to set 
in which tend to eliminate the machine and restore the 
hoe? This is the grain of pessimism that inheres in 


32 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


farming. Did not the large landholder in Rumania be- 
fore the war employ the high types of farm machines in 
an efficient agriculture? And after the war, on the 
break-up of the large holdings, did not the peasants junk 
the machines and go back to peasant farming? Who 
will guarantee that peasant farming shall never creep 
over America? Who will guarantee that landholding in 
America shall not pass into the small holdings of peasant 
owners and peasant tenants? Who can guarantee that 
America shall not be so thoroughly industrialized, that 
the clamor for cheap food will not break down our im- 
migration bars and let in a peasant population upon the 
land ? 

It is this uncertainty that keeps the agrarian states- 
man awake. The thinking of the American farmer will 
be gaged by the conditions under which he labors. If 
the peasant follows close upon the heels of a disappear- 
ing farm engineer, then peasant thinking will come to 
be the habit of the farm community. If the hoe returns 
and muscle again becomes the engine of farm power, 
then rural society will suffer a reverse and enter upon 
one more long era of rising, falling, and rising again. 
This possible dark spot in the portrait of the future 
farmer will keep alert all those who believe that condi- 
tions surrounding the thinker gear thinking up or down. 
The well balanced patriot takes the pessimism into full 
account, while he tries to work out his rosy portrait. 


CHAPTER III 


THE FARMER’S STANDARD OF LIVING 


i IVING conditions,’’ ‘‘standard of living,’’ ‘‘bet- 
ter housing,’’ ‘‘better home surroundings,’’ 
are phrases so current that the man of the 
street in our cities has a knowledge of them sufficient 
for intelligent conversation. City industry has studied 
the human factor in production. It has sized up the in- 
fluence and bearing of many personal characteristics of 
its labor force. Factories of the higher order now quote 
‘‘the figures’’ on ‘‘better housing,’’ ‘‘better food,’’ some 
‘‘leisure,’’ ‘‘night schools,’’ as these relate to annual 
production. In fact, the theory is quite general that 
industrial labor in America must have a good ‘‘standard 
of living’’ in order to produce American goods. 

The labor-unions and the American Federation of 
Labor have not been slow to seize upon this theory of 
American production as a weapon cf economic offense 
and defense to enforce wage demands. The basic theory 
of labor in every new wage demand or amelioration, of 
working conditions, whether of shorter hours or protec- 
tion from occupational accident and disability, is keep- 
ing a ‘‘decent standard of living.’’ This ‘‘fair stand- 
ard’’ or ‘‘high standard’’ or ‘‘decent standard”’ of liv- 


ing has come to have an equivalent, viz. ‘‘ American 
33 


34 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


standard of living.’’ However indefinite the concept, 
‘‘American standard of living’’ means in most minds a 
condition of living with respect to food, housing, clothes, 
leisure, education, insurance, amusement, religion, which 
an American need not be ashamed of; a condition of 
living surrounding the American workman which re- 
sults in better work, at the same time that the worker 
is given a chance to improve his opportunities and as- 
eend the American ladder of progress. 

When we pass from the city industrial wage-worker 
over to agriculture and to discussions of agricultural 
problems, standard of living for the most part drops 
out of sight. The farmer is urging in his defense the 
high cost of production of the products he has to sell, 
the high price of what he has to buy for his family, 
and the low price at which he must sell his own prod- 
ucts, if indeed he can sell them at all. His emotions 
have evidently been so taken up with the demonstrable 
disparity between what he gets and what he pays that 
he has overlooked or discounted the argument of 
““standard of living.’’ Farm labor in America, more- 
over, has yet no public voice, no union, no press organ, no 
economic theory or policy. It seems willing yet to rise 
with the rise of the farmer, and to depend upon the 
farmer’s argument, organization, legislative lobby, and 
agricultural press to restore himself when he drops with 
the farmer. The tenant farmer, even, has not succeeded 
in differentiating his cause from the farm owner- 
operator, at least enough to employ the standard of living 
weapon. There are, however, signs that the three agri- 
cultural classes will soon be taking stock of their living 


STANDARD OF LIVING 35 


conditions and bringing standard of living to bear on 
economic discussions. 

The movement of negro farm workers from the fields of 
the South to the factories of the North is causing South- 
ern landowners to start a better housing program on 
their plantations. If the old cabins do not hold the col- 
ored man to the plantation, more modern houses may. 
Where good tenant farmers are at a premium, a sanitary 
comfortable house may be a local inducement of a deci- 
sive nature. Farm-owning operators having sons and 
daughters of the adolescent age agree to the installation 
of modern systems of water-supply, heating, and light- 
ing as a last resort in the endeavor to retain their chil- 
dren on the farm. Better standards are of course being 
adopted—in some things, moreover, under the force of 
modern pushing commercial agencies. But, as a stated 
problem, the subject on the whole has risen very little 
into publie consciousness. It is true that one leading 
farm economist has uttered the advice to farmers to 
begin a regular policy of investing surplus in better 
facilities for family living rather than of racing with 
one another for more land, and so boosting up the land 
values of the country-side to the danger point. 

There is one aspect, however, in the development of 
agriculture which should be noted at this point, for the 
reason. that it indicates how ready the farmer class is to 
consider broadly the question of standards of living. 
This is it. For two decades the farmer has discussed 
the living of his animals from every point of view, and 
he is perfectly acquainted with a high standard of living 
and a low standard for cows, hogs, horses, beef-cattle, 


36 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


sheep, and poultry. This concept of standard of living 
goes from food to shelter, exercise, handling by men, 
health, and the like. The farmer of America now un- 
derstands in regard to his live stock the values of scien- 
tifie feeding, adequate housing, health protection, and 
gentle treatment. 

No argument is needed now in farmer gatherings to 
justify even specialized housing for different types of 
animals: dairy barns, hog houses, poultry houses. No 
argument is needed for the comfort of easy stanchions, 
sanitary barn-yards, humane handling of animals. It 
looks as if the way were paved from the farm right up 
to the farm-house and farm family for the scientific dis- 
cussion and consideration of the standard of living of 
the farm family. 


Faminy Livinea 


The basic factors in living, so far as they are 
more or less under control of the family and are 
subject to measurement and discussion, are generally 
agreed to be food, clothing, fuel, housing, operation, 
maintenance of health, advancement (including educa- 
tion, religion, travel, etc.), personal savings, govern- 
ment. Such broad headings are serviceable simply 
as a means of classifying all the items that make 
up the satisfaction of family wants. These items cost 
something. They must be provided either through pur- 
chase or effort. They constitute the aim of a farm fam- 
ily, and provide the motive-power for occupational work. 
To be aware of all the wants of a farm family, to sum 
up and classify these wants during a whole year, is to 


STANDARD OF LIVING 37 


enter upon the consideration of family living. These 
wants and these goods are the stuff which every-day 
family life is made up of. They form severally in every 
farm home the bulk of the topics for conversation. 
Nothing is more interesting, nothing more commonplace. 
And yet in spite of this fact, how seldom a family at- 
tempts to become master of all the details of its annual 
living! How few families know how to compare one 
set of wants with another! How few families provide 
for a distribution of goods to meet their wants in pro- 
portion to the priorities required by a normal, healthy 
family life! The commonplace and familiar affords a 
field for mysteries, just because the family is so im- 
mersed in life piece by piece, day by day, that it can 
never manage to find time to look at its experience as a 
whole. 


Tue IDEA OF STANDARD OF LIVING 


Many items, we have seen, enter into the idea of living. 
The several major items, such as food, clothing, and hous- 
ing, for example, break up into a perfect multitude of 
items. Foods are many, far more in their differing 
varieties than the ordinary person suspects. Meat, milk, 
wheat, butter, fruit, ete.—each breaks into many vari- 
eties. And each variety presents many grades and con- 
ditions, according to age, handling, cooking, and the like. 
Clothing is a manifold factor. Housing with its fur- 
nishings and equipment is also multi-varied. 

In the presence of this multiplicity of varieties and 
grades and conditions of all the elements of entering into 
‘‘living goods,’’ one must constantly ask the question, 


38 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


‘‘Which kind do you mean?’’ or ‘‘Which proportion 
do you mean?’’ The answer to and decision of these 
questions al! depend upon what is aimed at in a living 
over and above bare keeping alive; or, as is more often 
the case, upon what can be afforded. Food has more 
uses, apparently, than simple sustenance. Food is 
taken by a group of the family at a meal, and this meal 
is a social occasion. To linger over a meal, around the 
table, is more or less a custom. The pleasing form of 
food, the variety of possible pleasing forms, enter into 
the question of how far a family can afford to go in 
the matter of adjusting food to social uses. Clothes, 
likewise, are social as well as sheltering and protective. 
No single utility of living has been seized upon by the 
human race and made to express social and esthetic 
ideas more generally than clothes. In any considera- 
tion of the function of clothes from the point of view 
of how far to go in variety, textile materials, color, 
form, style, there must be considered this matter of 
social utilization as well as bodily protection. It is 
a very complicated process deliberately and rationally to 
adjust family living both to basic bodily wants and to 
social uses. Housing and house furnishings carry a 
mark of quality. Vehicles stamp the owners with class 
distinction. People have come to put their class and 
quality into these necessities of life, and so show to the 
world where they stand. Life is so short; conversation 
is so tedious; a quick method is needed of indicating 
where one belongs. Living utilities are discovered to 
be quickly discernible means of advertising these 
things. 


STANDARD OF LIVING 39 


But social quality and basic necessity are only two as- 
pects of living facilities which call for decision according 
to some measure or standard of what is wanted. The nu- 
trition scientist has his point of view on foods; the 
clothing expert, on clothes; the home economist, on 
housing; the educator, on schooling. It is not bare 
keeping alive, not an insignia of taste, quality, and class, 
but a function, that these scientists plead for, adjusted 
to an ampler, fuller, more adequate keeping alive, which 
at the same time takes into account what can be af- 
forded, what is feasible, practicable. 

Out of the multiplicity of possible choices of family 
living and family living facilities, to choose rationally 
means setting up standards of choice; to choose irration- 
ally is to take what comes; to choose and follow custom, 
which is the usual way, is to shift responsibility to a 
natural long-time sifting-out process. But the very 
important thing to be seen at this point is that these 
standards of choice, whether rational or irrational, are 
usually very intangible, very indefinite, hard to state, 
and impossible of exact or statistical expression. Here 
is where the statistician enters the discussion arm in arm 
with the home economist, the farm economist, and the 
sociologist. 

The home economist says, ‘‘If I am to assist the farm 
family in a more orderly, economical, adequate expen- 
diture of the family income on living materials and 
facilities, I must be able to compare quickly and intel- 
ligibly the living of family with family wherever they 
may reside.”’ 

The farm economist says, ‘‘If I am expected to answer 


40 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the question of what kind of a living the farm family 
can afford, I must have some way of speaking of the 
living so that it shall be exactly the same as that con- 
sidered by the home economist.’’ 

The rural sociologist says, ‘‘If the living of farmers is 
to be related to a program of rural progress, present 
family living must be susceptible of definite description 
so that we may understand where the deficiencies lie, 
and prepare to better the conditions.’’ 

The statistician says: ‘‘My friends, you are in need 
of me, I plainly see. Everybody has been speaking 
vaguely of this matter of farm family living. No 
builder could build a house using his materials so 
vaguely. Every part of a house is measurable, de- 
seribable. It can therefore be specified, and the cost 
forecast. I will help you measure the living of farm 
families. JI will help you erect measures and standards. 
You will then be able to build up an annual budget of 
living for a family of any particular income. You will 
be able to say that such and such an income will not 
afford a basic living. But such and such another income 
will. This income will support a man and wife. This 
income, a family of three. This income, a family of 
seven.”’ 

Let us follow the steps of the learned quartet a Little 
further as they try to elucidate their problem and search 
for a statistical standard of the living of the farm 
family. 

The statistician points out: ‘‘There is one measure 
of living materials, goods, or facilities that is ready at 


STANDARD OF LIVING 41 


hand, viz., the dollar measure, or measure of cost of 
these goods to the family. What a family uses, whether 
furnished by the farm or purchased, may be reckoned 
in quantities and then the costs determined.’’ So it 
would be possible for any farm family to find out the 
cost of its annual living. ‘‘In like manner, it could 
be found out,’’ the statistician continues, ‘‘what the 
living of the farm family of any region or State of the 
United States costs, supposing that a farm family of 
any size or make-up is considered a unit, and that the 
eosts of all families in the group desired were ascer- 
tained for a year.”’ 

If a study of the costs of living of the farm families 
of a region were made, then it would be found that there 
were certain well defined gradations of costs, correlated | 
broadly with the presence or absence of certain facil- 
ities in living. These particular costs would come to 
stand out undoubtedly as standards. And so there 
might come into vogue the thousand-dollar family, fif- 
teen-hundred-dollar family, two-thousand-dollar family, 
three-thousand-dollar family. 

The cost of living in dollars would tend to become a 
standard of living; and it would almost occur that the 
thousand-dollar living would come to be thought of as 
a low standard and the three-thousand-dollar living as a 
high standard. The assumption then would be that, as 
farm families run, the greater the cost, the better the 
living. 

It will be quickly pointed out by the home economist 
that food may be costly in a budget but not necessarily 


42 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


nourishing ; clothes may be high-priced, but not warmer, 
not more durable than some that are low-priced; houses 
may be inexpensive, but just as comfortable and protec- 
tive as expensive ones. And these statements would 
have truth. But in the absence of any other method of 
measuring living goods, the cost of living will be 
gladly put into service, temporarily at least, as a 
standard. 

It is not beyond expectation that the home economist, 
the economist, the rural sociologist, and the statistician 
will eventually discover other standards than the cost, 
for the farm family’s living. It would be scarcely short 
of a miracle, however, to discover any other single stand. 
ard; though it is possible that a better standard than 
the dollar may be found for food, for clothes, for hous- 
ing, and for each of the other factors. 

Perhaps the dollar could be employed to bring into 
a common measure each of these revised better measures. 
Certainly such a cost figure, if possible, would be far 
superior to the present cost standard and would be 
free from the charge that the dollar had no necessary 
relation to utility or basic value. 


PRESENT KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE FARM F'AmMIty’s LIVING 


Do we know anything about the American farm fam- 
ily’s living even in a vague, general way? Yes, some- 
thing. Everybody knows, of course, that the farm itself 
furnishes, even in these days of production for the domes- 
tic and world market, a not inconsiderable amount of the 
family living. This fact presents an interesting dif- 
ference between farm families and city families. That 


STANDARD OF LIVING 43 


the farm and the garden and the orchard can furnish 
house-rent, fuel, meat, milk, eggs, poultry, potatoes, 
apples, other fruits, small fruits, without interfering 
with or diminishing the marketing of the regular annual 
crop, is a salient advantage that must never be over- 
looked in a discussion of the farmer’s standard of living. 
This is the fact that makes agriculture so independent 
and self-sufficing. This fact has in all history set even 
the peasants apart in hard times as a fortunate class. 
Moreover, the kinds of food furnished, close to the 
source as they are, and excelling in freshness, are basic. 
They are such as all families crave to give body and 
balance to the family ration. The fact that farmers 
in some regions neglect the possibilities of furnishing 
their own tables with milk, eggs, vegetables, fruits, is 
one of the many incomprehensible things in human 
nature. 

A study of the family living of 483 familes in ten 
widely scattered States, so far as it was furnished by 
the farm, was made in the summer of 1913 by the United 
States Department of Agriculture. It was found that 
the farm furnished per family $261.35 worth of food; 
$34.72 worth of fuel; $125.10 worth of house-rent; a 
total of $421.17, which was $91.97 per capita. In terms 
of the present-day buying power of the dollar, this 
would be equivalent to about $634 per family and $140 
per person. 

A study made in 1921 by the Department of Agri- 
culture of the living furnished and purchased by the 
farm in 402 farm families of New York State indicates 
the following: 


RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


44 


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6E8 811 6L1E 668 cee eer eee eresceereeeee er eee seers poor 
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STANDARD OF LIVING 45 


It would, in all likelihood, be a fair statement of the 
ease that with the knowledge which home economics is 
bringing to the women of America, and especially to 
the rural women, the farm home at the end of the next 
decade will be able to make a showing from twenty per 
cent to thirty-five per cent better than now, in the mat- 
ter of what the farm furnishes to the average farm 
family’s living. 

Many similar studies will be necessary before we shall 
know about the farm family’s living. We need to know 
the living on the upper level, the lower level, and the 
mid-level. We need to know the owner’s living on these 
levels, and the tenant’s living, as well as the living of 
the family of the farm wage laborer. 


FARMERS’ STANDARD OF LIVING AND Its INFLUENCE 


It is a usual assumption that a good living tends to 
high production, whether in a family, class, region, or na- 
tion. <A good living and a stable production of goods of 
quality are assumed to go hand in hand. We need more 
hight on this assumption, especially since a bare assump- 
tion is so little convincing. We need to be convinced 
by incontrovertible facts that a well fed, well housed, 
well educated farm community well equipped with insti- 
tutions is a better producer than a poorly nourished, 
poorly housed, poorly educated community. There is a 
sly opinion still floating among certain types of public 
men that cheap labor on farms, low-standard workers 
and operators of farms, can produce the nation’s food 
and fiber just as well as high-standard workers. Such 
men forget among other things that the industrialist 


46 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


needs a high-standard market for his goods. Thirty 
millions of low-standard farm people, buying a great 
deal less because wanting a great deal less, would 
searcely make a sufficient market for America’s city- 
made goods. At present cities count upon a great farm 
market for high-grade goods. 

The low standard of living on farms—low from any 
point of view or by any criterion—will drive good far- 
mers eventually into other occupations, and inevitably 
tend to run the farm population through a sieve that 
sorts out the better men and women and leaves the 
poorer grade to enjoy the low standard of living. M1i- 
gration of the best men and women away from the farms 
is the answer to a low standard of livelihood on farms. 


Factors THat Mopiry Farmers’ STANDARDS OF LIVING 


Passing over the great factors, income, net worth, and 
general financial ability—factors that automatically set 
limits to the standard of life which a family may afford 
—let us look at some less well known factors that modify 
the farmers’ quality of living. 

The first to engage our attention is the system of retail 
merchandising to which farm families are subject in 
making the expenditure of whatever income they have. 
Food, clothing, house-furnishings, and the like come to 
the farmer quite largely through the medium of country 
stores, small hamlet stores, small village stores. It is 
enough to excite our surprise if not our suspicion, when 
we compare the assistance city stores offer to the middle 
classes of city people with the assistance afforded by 


STANDARD OF LIVING AT 


country stores to farmers. City stores bring an intel- 
ligent appreciation of a high standard of living to bear 
upon their merchandising methods. The country stores 
as yet simply sell commodities over the counter. We 
cannot but feel that the farmer is not being intelligently 
served by his agents of trade and that he is decidedly 
handicapped in his effort to maintain an American 
standard of living. 

Another factor influencing standards is the condition 
of American rural highways. Highways measure op- 
portunity to purchase commodities, goods, and skilled 
services. Highways determine facilities for advance- 
ment. So long as highways are generally bad, and im- 
passable in winter and spring, the farmer will suffer in 
the quality of his living. He pays in the form of a lower 
manner of living the price for poor conditions of getting 
to and from good stores and good institutions. The en- 
couraging aspect of the rural highway situation is that 
improved highways are fast coming, and that the farmer 
is utilizing his new opportunity and apparently greatly 
improving his buying ability. 

A third factor, and one not to be lightly disposed of, 
is the inertia, so to speak, of a standard of living—the 
tendency to continue a mode of life through sheer cus- 
tom. The psychological and even physical adjustment 
of a family to a certain type of food, clothing, housing, 
education, church facility, medical facility, are not easy 
of change, even though it be to improve them. Low 
standards tend to perpetuate themselves. High stand- 
ards likewise tend to survive the obstacle of an im- 
paired income. Families accustomed to good clothes, 


48 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


good house-furnishings, education, will sacrifice much 
to maintain the standard. Here is where special diffi- 
culty arises when a whole community is accustomed to 
a low standard in some one respect, education, for 
example. The past overawes and hypnotizes, A near 
upheaval is required to crack open the old custom. An 
encouraging phenomenon of our day is the presence in 
rural counties of persons whose official business it is to 
enter rural communities in a friendly way and break the 
silence of custom. A home demonstration agent’s quiet 
voice of invitation to a new idea is like a sound that 
breaks the reverie of a person and starts him from his 
dream into action or new thinking. 

It will be pardoned, I am sure, if mention is made of 
a fourth factor bearing upon the maintenance of a cer- 
tain level of living on farms. Farmers have par excel- 
lence a high standard of life in the conditions of space 
for the family, air, sunlight, quiet, freedom from the 
shocks of a congested population. These high condi- 
tions of life are sometimes called ‘‘rural.’’ City people 
have high conditions of life in respect to associations 
and institutions. These are called ‘‘urban.’’ The 
notion then prevails that certain standards of life, being 
‘‘rural,’’ cannot be had by city people, and that other 
standards, being ‘‘urban,’’ are not for farm people. 
This idea, fixed in the minds of city people, keeps them 
from seeking earnestly to procure for their families the 
high rural conditions; and, no less, the fixed idea that 
certain advantages of the city are urban becomes a 
check upon farm people, preventing them from a vigor- 
ous attempt to procure these high city conditions 


STANDARD OF LIVING 49 


of life. ‘‘Aping city ways’’ is the expression of this 
attitude. Being a ‘‘rube’’ is the city man’s counter-at- 
titude. The fact is that these concepts of what befits 
a farm family and what befits a city family were formed 
when frontier and pioneer conditions prevailed. These 
prejudices have run over into an age when the two atti- 
tudes no longer hold true to the new situations. The 
old idea was that farmers should work, not play. City 
people might have holidays, short hours of work, leisure ; 
but farm people should be ashamed to be idle when there 
was so much to do and so much left undone. On the 
other hand, city people, it is felt, must live close in, 
near to the heart of business. They may not move out 
into the country and live as royally as farmers, while 
pursuing their occupations in town. These two obses- 
sions stand as barriers to a high standard of living, bar- 
riers to be swept away. 


A New AMERICAN Farm FAMILY STANDARD 


There is evidence that the American farmer is creating 
for his family and community a new standard of living. 
One straw pointing the way of the new wind is the 
modern farm-house, equipped with modern bath-room, 
hot and cold running water, modern sewage disposal, 
gas or electric light and power for washing, a well kept 
lawn, and some palings, psychological or otherwise, in- 
closing the house and shutting it off from farm work, 
farm buildings, and farm animals. In a very real sense 
the ‘‘modernized’’ house is a housing standard that re- 
lates to the kitchen and woman’s work, to the care of 
children, to the comfort of the man. No single factor, 


50 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


probably, is so influential in attaining a high all-round 
standard of living. 

The vehicle for family use is another clear mark of 
the farmer’s new step up in living. The American 
farm family lays claim to motor vehicles for every-day 
use in the family. Though it is an urban piece of 
equipment, no one accuses the farmer nowadays of 
‘‘aping the city’? when he comes to town in a high- 
powered motor-car. 

The consolidated school is another definite advance in 
living. There is now no quibble over the idea. It is 
accepted among farmers. Not that it is yet the prevail- 
ing type of school, but it is there and needs no special 
defense. 

The day when the farm family will cease to be dis- 
cussed as a queer species of people requiring conditions 
of life and standards of living a little lower than other 
people is already in its forenoon. 


CHAPTER IV 


SOME PROBLEMS THAT CONFRONT FARM 
WOMEN 


HEN ‘American farm life passes from frontier- 

\ \ ism to modernism women will be found lead- 

ing the movement. If the passing is dra- 

matic, spectacular, wonderful, they will furnish the ac- 

tion and the surprise. The place of the farm woman in 

the development of rural life is of such a key nature, 

therefore, that it is well worth our while to pay some at- 
tention to-a few special problems which confront her. 


SHORTENING THE ,WorK Day AND GAINING SOME 
Free TIME 


The long work day on the American farm has been 
the source of much unfavorable comment from both 
urban and rural sources. The fourteen-, fifteen-, or 
sixteen-hour day stands as an archaism in American 
life. The fight of the industrial worker for an eight- 
hour day has nearly been successful. The seven-hour 
day in government service, the six- or seven-hour bank 
and professional service day, all raise in the mind of 
people a serious question about the necessity of the 
proverbially long day. It is not only the farm laborer 


who hates the farm lantern. It is the growing boy on 
51 


52 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the farm. It is the farm girl. And it is the farmer 
himself. But it is especially, perhaps, the farm woman. 
She must be ‘up in the morning, and she must tuck 
everybody in bed at night. So long as anybody on the 
farm is at work, she is at work, too. It seems to fall 
now to the lot of the woman on the farm to find a way 
for everybody to do the tasks of the farm in shorter 
time. How can she go about it? How can she hope 
to do what nobody has yet done—devise a plan which 
shall provide for all the things that must be done, and 
yet do all in a shorter time? Let us face this matter 
squarely. 

It should be remembered that the desultory work 
day gave place in the course of civil organization to the 
regular fixed work day as a result of thought, codrdina- 
tion, and adjustment. It was a civilizing step. It 
cost something. Somebody had to give up a habit not 
only, but doubtless also some special privileges. The 
modern industrial day has been shortened through a 
succession of steps made possible, not only by struggle, 
demand, and force, but also by ingenuity, by trial, by 
venture, by reorganization. In this process, somebody 
always solemnly averred that the ‘‘impossible’’ was 
attempted. No one involved as employer with any 
system of work days could see the possibility of shorter 
days, until foreed to think the matter through. When 
force brought serious consideration, then light began to 
shine through the problem. 

Who shall force through the shorter farm day? If 
farm labor ever unionizes successfully, it is possible that 
labor will be the battering-ram. But this way seems a 


SOME PROBLEMS 53 


long distance off. We come back to the woman. She 
has always felt the goading prick of the work day. It 
has driven her when it has driven anybody. Let her 
first of all take comfort in the fact that the farm day 
problem must come up and must be solved sooner or 
later, and that the time is now at hand. 

The distribution of the woman’s time among her own 
tasks day after day, year in and year out, is matter of 
habit, come down to her by tradition from mothers and 
grandmothers of many generations. These tasks have, 
in all probability, taken the form of involuntary, almost 
automatic, sequence. A change in routine comes like a 
jar or jolt, bringing a sense of new trouble. The tasks 
are normal. They seem right. They have never been 
brought into serious question. Here is where the farm 
woman can learn a lesson suggested by the keeping 
of accounts of money expenditures. One aspect of the 
value of keeping a record of the expenditure of all the 
money one has passing through his fingers is that this 
record will form a basis for criticizing the expenditures 
of the year and will bring about an improvement or 
saving for next year. 

The fact is that the farm woman has as an asset a 
day twenty-four hours long, day after day, for a year. 
This twenty-four-hour period must be distributed wisely 
among certain demands and expended wisely upon each 
of these demands. So many hours for sleep; the work- 
ing remnant of hours distributed among certain types 
of household tasks, personal matters, social duties out- 
side of the household, and other necessary or desired 
activities. If custom and desultory circumstance con- 


54 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


trol the distribution of this time, then the woman is in 
the same position with regard to the utilization of her 
precious twerty-four hours as is the person who never 
keeps account of his money expenditures. The prob- 
ability is that the establishment of a system of records 
of the expenditure of her time in such fashion as will 
show the distribution of her day among the duties, tasks, 
and pleasures that are her lot will enable her to improve 
upon her scheme of distribution and expenditure of 
time with something of the same certainty with which 
accounts have improved business of all sorts. 

Let us describe a method of accounting of the farm 
woman’s day and year, and set it up as a proposal for 
all farm women, a first step in shortening the work day 
» and giving the woman longer spaces of leisure. 

Let us arbitrarily divide the woman’s activities during 
her waking hours into five classes: free time, work with 
and for children, farm work, preparing meals, other 
housework. Let the free time be considered time free 
from routine work, left to her for personal matters, 
rest, reading, visiting, going to town, and the like. 
Some other classification may do just as well, if so be 
that it brings to the fore activities which one feels like 
serutinizing closely to see how much time is consumed 
on them. Whatever the number of classes and the sorts 
of activities, it remains to make a daily record, first, of 
the amount of time expended in each activity, and, 
second, just at what point in the day this time was so 
expended. 

This leads up to the record sheet. Every day will 
have its sheet. This sheet will take form to fit the mind 


SOME PROBLEMS 55 


of the worker. Several devices are possible. In all 
these devices appear the numbers of the clock hours 
consecutively, from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., for example. If 
these numbers are in a line from top to bottom, the 
A.M. hours being at the top following one another down 
to 12 noon, these followed by the p.m. hours, then lines 
across the sheet may be drawn so as to give space be- 
tween two lines for every hour of this waking day. 
Lines may be drawn Jengthwise of the sheet dividing the 
sheet into four long spaces. The sheet will then ap- 
pear checkered, and the 4 a.M. hour will have four 
Spaces, and every other hour four spaces likewise. The 
record will be made in these checkered spaces. Each 
such space will be a fifteen-minute space, four spaces 
making up the hour. Let us give each of the five activ- 
ities of the woman’s waking day a number, as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 
or a letter, as a, b,c, d,e, f. If ‘‘ preparing meals’’ is 4 
and it takes all the hour between 11 a.m. and 12 noon 
to prepare the noon meal, then 4 will go in each of the 
four spaces that le between 11 A.M. and noon. In like 
manner every space on the record sheet will be filled 
with its appropriate number or letter. 

Just when the record will be made on the sheet will, 
after a while, become a matter of easy decision. It 
doubtless will need at first to be done twice a day at 
least; after a while, once, at the end of the day. When 
the records have been kept for a month—for example, 
the month of January—then the second part of the 
method comes into play, namely, to make graphic or 
quickly visible the results of the records made day by 
day. 


56 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


The graphic record of a month can be made by the 
daughter who is in school and who likes to show her craft 
in colors and neat designs. She can take a sheet of 
letter-paper eight by ten and a half inches, and rule it 
into thirty-one quarter-inch columns, a column for each 
day in the month. The hours of the day will appear at 
even intervals on the left-hand margin, beginning with 
4 4.M. and ending with 10 p.m. The daughter will, in 
the next place, translate the daily records of her mother 
into colors on this sheet. Each of the five activities will 
have its color. Colored pencils willdo. The right color, 
then, will be used in each day column for as many fif- 
teen-minute spaces, and at the proper point in the column 
as each record warrants. When the colors are all put in, 
then the color chart for January will show at a glance 
just where the work activities came, and where the free 
time and leisure. It will become possible, then, to experi- 
ment with the following month, to see whether a better 
distribution of work and leisure can be made. As the 
records are kept for each month, and the charts are made, 
month by month, the monthly charts covering the year 
can be pasted neatly together edge to edge upon a long 
strip of heavy paper and pinned on the wall for the care- 
ful scrutiny of the entire family. Here will begin, then, 
comparison and resultant thinking which will recon- 
struct the mother’s use of her time. 

It is possible, let us hope, that a year’s records of the 
housewife’s waking time put into colors will have per- 
suaded the father farmer to keep similar records for a 
year of his own activities and free time. The daughter 
or a son can assist the father, and make a year’s color 


SOME PROBLEMS 57 


chart to set up alongside the mother’s chart. The study 
of the two charts together will furnish unequaled mate- 
rial for reconstructing work activities, length of day, 
and length of free time for other things than labor. 


ECONOMICS OF THE WOMAN’S GARDEN 


Every farm woman has space for a home garden— 
space, let us assert, for an adequate home garden, too, 
whether she has a garden or not. It is with this possible 
space and its economic utilization that her problem at 
this point is concerned. This problem in many respects 
is similar to her husband’s economie problem of the dis- 
position of his farm space to such purpose as shall pay 
him. He has choices, several at many points. He must 
figure out his best choice or set of choices, ‘‘all things con- 
sidered.’’ So the farm woman must reckon out the best 
utilization of her possible space, ‘‘all things considered.’’ 

‘* All things considered’’ is a good place to begin the 
thinking. That her own mother used to do so-and-so in 
the garden is not ‘‘considering all things’’ far enough. 
Times have changed a little. She knows more now about 
the need of certain food elements for her family than did 
her mother or grandmother. A reconsideration of the 
whole garden space and garden enterprise, as if it were 
a new feature in the family, will pay many a housewife. 
The thoughtful designing of an adequate garden, bring- 
ing into play the assistance of the present-day experts on 
growing various products and the experts on the respec- 
tive values of certain nourishing foods will give the 
housewife a new intellectual interest in an enterprise 
that is as old as man. 


58 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


It is not the purpose of this discussion to give any 
technical advice on gardening itself, but only to raise to 
the dignity of a worthy vital problem the economic man- 
agement of the available garden space. The difference 
between an unplanned, neglected, little-valued garden 
and one upon which thinking, designing, love, and per- 
sonal interest, not to say pride and esthetic delight, have 
been lavished, in so wide that the money value of the lat- 
ter in the family budget may easily be the saving factor 
of the year. In these times of troublous adjustment to 
stabilized farm conditions, if the farm woman’s garden 
can supply from fifty to two hundred dollars’ worth 
of fresh vegetables and fruits with regularity through 
the year, instead of from ten to fifty dollars’ worth, as 
is more nearly the present case, the woman may really 
save the day. It is hard to exaggerate the money value 
of a fine garden. But the money value is by no means 
the only important value. The family need, the family 
growth into normal health, is the desideratum which out- 
values the money; for the point is that without such a 
garden the necessary garden elements cannot usually be 
had at any price. 

There is, however, a third value in the scientifically 
designed and cultivated farm garden which must not be 
put in the shadow by its money value and health value. 
This is the intellectual and esthetic value of a beautiful 
garden. As an adjunct of the home, the wonderful 
farm garden can help give that air of satisfying content- 
ment to the home itself for which there is no substitute 
nor any compensation. 

The routine of housework is broken by the fresh won- 


SOME PROBLEMS 59 


ders of a beautiful productive garden: The children are 
early brought into appreciation of the finer skills of crop 
raising. It is a refining influence upon all in the home. 
It is a little laboratory of scientific management that 
will work its way into the management of the farm. 

If objection is made that the garden is too large to 
handle with care, nicety, and beauty, then arises the pos- 
sibility of large production upon a smaller plot of garden 
tended with skill and affection. The neglected, overrun 
garden that accompanies many a farm-house is one of 
the sad sights in the American country-side. It takes 
more than the spring fever of planting to make a won- 
derful garden and sustain it splendidly till winter 
comes. It requires the element of a fine thought, an 
unveering quality of thought, to accomplish this thing. 
So commonplace is the garden! How the farmer sees 
over it, around it, under it—but never sees it with his 
‘‘fine thought’’! The farm woman’s fine thought will 
do it. 

Planned in winter. Talked over, thought over, in the 
hours around the winter fire. But in the same class with 
precious purposes long brooded over, the garden will 
come out in a startlingly beautiful form as a result. 

Six million farms. Six million gardens. Six million 
gardens engineered next year with a fine thought, a lov- 
ing, intelligent, beautiful care. Was there sixty million 
dollars’ worth of produce last year in these gardens? 
Next year there may be three hundred millions. Amer- 
ican home economics, the science of home management, 
has before it the chance of helping to create the beauti- 
ful, wonderful farm garden of the future, which will 


60 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


mark a very decided step upward from the frontier type 
of living. 


CoMBATING Dirt 


Civilization has always fought dirt. The frontier has 
to yield to dirt more than it would like. Any climb up 
from frontier conditions has been a climb from dirt to 
less dirt. Dirt and filth when uncombated lead quickly 
to squalor and loss of morale. It is the woman, in do- 
mestic matters, at least, who has always led the fight 
against dirt, and upon her shoulders will probably always 
fall this task. The farm woman has among modern 
women an especially difficult dirt problem. There are 
two very general reasons for this. One reason is the na- 
ture of farming as an occupation. The farmer works so 
much in contact with soil that the dusty, muddy elements 
of the soil cling to his hands, face, feet, and clothes, and 
become dirt and dirt particles when brought into the vi- 
cinity of the house and home. The second reason is that 
town, and city life has, under the guidance of its ideals 
of cleanliness, provided for both men and women better 
appliances and facilities for fighting dirt. The problem 
of dirt, therefore, is a major one for farm women, and 
it may help us, in thinking this problem out, to pass 
slowly through our minds some of the special phases 
of the dirt problem. 

There is a fight to keep dirt out of the house and to 
maintain a clean, healthful, sweet abiding-place. Men 
and boys especially, but also children and all members 
of the family, go into the house from time to time 
direct from contact with soil, barn, barn-yard, crops, 


SOME PROBLEMS 61 


animals, and machines. The problem here is first of all 
one with tradition, custom of the frontier. What has 
been done by men under the spur of necessity may have 
been carried over in practice to a time when the necessity 
no longer exists. 

The wash-up room and change-of-clothes room, either 
in the house itself or in some other building, is the usual 
contrivance to stem the tide of dirt at the outer portal. 
This is not so difficult to achieve. In summer, washing 
up out of doors or on a back veranda is common, and no 
protest is uttered. A more serious intrusion into the 
habits of the man and boy is the exclusion of work 
boots and shoes from the inner precincts of the house 
and the change in the wash-room from outer work 
clothes to house clothes. This shift meets the protest 
of the masculine. It avails little to cite the customs 
of clean Japan. The man falls back on American farm 
custom. Here is where the ideal will need planting 
firmly by the woman. 

When the woman has the cheerful codperation of the 
men in keeping a clean house, she still has the usual 
problem of house-cleaning; and here her insistence upon 
modern tools and appliances for easing the labor of 
cleaning will be required. 

The fight on dirt must next be carried to the family 
vehicles, whether wagon, carriage, or automobile. It is 
no easy matter to have a carriage or automobile clean 
on the inside so that the family will have no fear for 
best clothes. The automobile is the house in transit. 
The captaincy, of the woman rules here, and she may 
well fly her flag when the family, dressed for church, 


62 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


picnic, or a visit, step in. To uphold a parlor ideal or A 
sitting-room-furniture ideal with respect to the automo- 
bile may overturn tradition. But the ideal can be np- 
held when the fight on dirt is waged with spirit and 
intelligence. / 

Woman, time out of mind, has had her combat with 
the dirt in clothes. Some of her severest strams have 
been involved in this struggle. Modern invention has 
made possible through the power washing-machine a 
great alleviation of the struggle. There is still hope in 
the codperative laundry for farm women. The co- 
operative wet-wash laundry would take a great load off 
her shoulders. Even, however, with these aids to the 
ideal of clean clothes, the idea of proper clothes for the 
men—uniforms for grades of work, they might be con- 
sidered—in the interest of fewer very dirty clothes, will 
never come into farm fashion until established in the 
minds and customs of the men. 

Clean bodies, an ideal that the frontier wash-tub en- 
forced, centralized the fight of the woman against dirt 
in the house. A bathing room, with a modern bath-tub 
or shower-bath or both, is the answer here. It requires 
some ingenuity to find a place where this room can be 
made in a house handed down, let us say, for two gener- 
ations. To lead the opinion of the home up to running 
hot water and finally to bathing facilities will require a 
deal of overcoming of habit, custom, spurious economy. 

One phase of the combat against body dirt is the 
special struggle to keep clean hands. It is not throwing 
oneself open to the charge of a manicured hyper-refine- 
ment to plainly bring forward the issue of a house policy 


SOME PROBLEMS 63 


on clean hands. The farmer is not the only man who 
works at dirty jobs with his hands. The chemist, the 
photographer, the skilled worker in metals, the elec- 
trician, the artisan, the railroad engineer, a vast array 
of men in modern life work in dirty materials with their 
hands, How do they manage the problem of clean 
hands? Where possible they protect their hands, doing 
this in many ways. A study of the question of protec- 
tion of the hands not only against dirt but against the 
friction that makes the farmer ‘‘horny-handed’’ will 
come within the field of the farm woman who is using 
her mentality in the home. 

There is truth in the idea that a visible committal to 
cleanness outside of the home will help every fight for 
cleanness within. And here is where the yard, the 
home yard, the immediate space about the house—some- 
times spoken of as the lawn, front lawn, back lawn, 
side lawn—comes into view. <A clean environment from 
the house walls for a few yards or rods in all directions 
will immensely help in keeping the house clean and 
will assist in the whole combat with dirt. Cement 
walks from every house door to the various buildings 
used helps the idea further. A yard all about the house 
kept sacred from the intrusion of animals, machines, 
trash, litter, will be a sign and signal of the cleanness 
ideal. Keeping dirt off the yard warns everybody 
that the home is one where dirt is an enemy as much 
as vermin. It is remarkable how a definite line that 
shows distinctly where the yard begins and dirt 
ends aids the general idea. This line may be a fence, 
a hedge, a coping, or a wall, a line of bushes or trees; 


64 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


but in its simplest form it may be only a neatly edged 
sod in a graceful line. The human mind responds to 
these little devices. They are tricks in the trade of 
policing, the ‘‘thus far and no farther.’’ 

The advance of the farm home and the farm occapa- 
tion from pioneer conditions to modern standards should 
be taken without leaving a stigma upon the lower level 
outlived and left behind. No one is to be eriticized for 
the frontier. Farming is not ‘‘on the green carpet.’’ 
The farm home is not under fire, either as it is now or 
as it has been at any time. The questions and problems 
that confront farm women are just such as farm women 
are aiming at all over America. Our discussion lays 
emphasis only on systematizing the efforts to attain 
these ends. 

The shorter day carrying more leisure, the beautiful 
garden bringing health and economy, the clean house 
and home, are the aims of farm women; and everybody 
bids them God-speed. 


CHAPTER V 


WHERE THE FARM FAMILY TRADES 


HERE does the farmer trade? Do you know? 

\ \ And could you describe the place or places, 

so that any one else would know? Why 
does he trade there? What does it mean in family life 
and community life for the farmer to trade where he 
does? Is there a better place to trade? How could the 
farmer and his family have a better trading place and 
better trading facilities? Will this come to pass? Are 
there any evidences, any straws pointing? Who will 
make the first move? If we can answer half these ques- 
tions, we shall do well. 

Few writers on the human aspects of farming and 
farm life give time and consideration to the farmer’s 
family purchases. Buying things is so easy a matter 
in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, if 
one has the money or credit to buy with, that the ques- 
tion whether the farmer can buy what he wants even 
when he has the money is naturally overlooked. It is 
therefore necessary to spend a little time on the part 
that the goods such as a family usually purchases play 
in life, and in farm life particularly. We need not take 
up every article. Perhaps clothes, house-furnishings, 


and dentistry will answer our purpose. Here are items 
65 , 


66 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


that make up about twenty per cent of a family budget. 
Dentistry, a skilled service with a modicum of actual 
goods, is a sample of several of the satisfactions of fam- 
ily wants that the farmer, if he has the service, must 
purchase. 

Let us put the question direct: How important in 
life, in American life to be definite, is it to have acces- 
sible at all times a place where all kinds of the clothing 
necessary for a family can be purchased? All the 
kinds, let us go on to say, which the ingenuity and ex- 
perience of the clothing-makers have made possible ; and, 
let us hasten to add, all the kinds of clothes, selected by 
the skill and advice of the clothing agents from whom 
the ultimate consumer buys? <A place easy to reach. 
Goods of wide variety. Skilled, trusted agents of trade. 
When one wants clothes, to be able at that moment to 
get them. When one wants the best that one’s money 
should buy, to be able to have a wise, skilled agent who 
knows clothes, knows the markets where they may be 
gathered from, knows the wants of his customer, and 
knows how to let his customer hear about them. Every- 
body knows that these are the conditions for being well 
dressed. Everybody knows that with money to pay for 
clothes, but with no chance to get a variety of clothes, 
with no skill or particular intelligence about clothes on 
the part of the agent, we have the conditions for being 
poorly dressed. If clothes make the man, or even help 
to make the man, being able to be well dressed according 
to one’s means is a large part of living facilities. 

House-furnishings and furniture are like clothes. 
They give the air of home, of station, of class, that every 


WHERE THE FARM FAMILY TRADES 67 


one seeks, not to impress the stranger but for the family 
itself. The difference between a good house and a poor 
house is often a difference on the inside, in the furnish- 
ings. To be near the best, to see variety, to know that 
one is well advised, is to be well housed. 

If accessible facilities for securing good clothes and 
house-furnishings mean so much, it cannot be doubted 
that accessibility to good dentistry helps to make a pre- 
sentable and happy family. The teeth are small mem- 
bers of the human body, but they play a great role in 
health and comfort. Old age is staved off by the good 
dentist. But if one cannot reach the dentist? <Ah, 
there ’s the rub. At any rate, it is these very practical 
matters that face us in the trade problem. 

Only a glance is needed at trade and merchandising 
conditions in our cities ranging from twenty-five 
thousand population upward to see what advantage 
city people have in their clothing stores. City people 
have the pick of the world’s clothes at their doors. 
They can fit their purchases to their purses. They have 
at their service the skill of men and women who know 
special kinds of clothes. .A shoe man knows shoes. He 
knows the foot, its ailments, its weaknesses. He fits 
the foot, and one depends upon his knowledge. The 
purchase involves a purchase of the dealer’s skill. The 
dress-goods dealer tells the purchaser about goods, helps 
select, knows styles, and has judgment. The city 
woman comes to rely upon this judgment. The out- 
come is that the city man and woman have at their 
command, in buying clothes, furniture, books, in- 
struments of music, everything that goes to make up a 


68 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


home, the trained intelligence of specialists who are 
accessible at a moment’s notice, who have the goods, 
and who cheerfully fill their customer’s needs. 

It is very pertinent as a part of the general rural 
problem to scan the farmer’s trade opportunities, to 
see whether there is any disparity between him and his 
city brother in getting commodities, skills, and services. 


INCOMPLETE AGGREGATIONS OF TRADE AGENCIES 


Where does the farmer trade? In country cross- 
roads general stores; in little hamlets possessing two or 
three competitive stores of the same general type; in 
villages containing more stores than the hamlet, but 
stores still very general and competitive in some lines 
at least; in towns that begin to specialize; in small 
eities; in large cities; in large cities by mail. 

If one had to answer in one word, he would say ‘‘vil- 
lages.’’ If he had four words, ‘‘country stores and 
villages.’’ But these words do not give the picture. 
It is a difficult one to portray. However, we shall try. 

Leaving aside the difference between regions in the 
United States, and there are some wide differences, to 
be sure, the first thing we must put into the picture is 
this outstanding fact: every farm family goes, yes, has 
to go, to several trade centers miles apart in order to 
get the variety and the grades of goods and services 
it desires. 

The farmer may utilize a cross-roads general store 
for a few standard groceries, a few items of clothing, 
some knickknacks, kitehen-ware, a few farm supplies. 


WHERE THE FARM FAMILY TRADES 69 


The mile to the cross-roads store stands in his mind over 
against five miles to a village. He may accept an article 
he does not want, rather than go to the village. If a 
commodity is not in the country store, it may turn out 
not to be carried in the nearest village; to some other 
village, then, the farmer must go. It is not unusual 
to have trade so divided and scattered among villages 
that a farm family will go to one village for feed, to 
another for farm implements, to a third for banking, to 
a fourth for freight; all this besides going occasionally 
to a larger town or city for an infrequent purchase. 
Whatever the frontier condition may have been that 
justified these village collections of merchandise, it is 
certainly in order now for some one to look over the 
situation for an alleviation. It is evident at a glance 
that the American farm family is still the victim of an 
unorganized merchandising system. For the farmer to 
be compelled to go from village to village to satisfy his 
wants or to do without commodities and_ services, 
presents a case of heedless perpetuation of the frontier. 

A whole group of villages may not carry some varieties 
of goods at all. What stocks there are may be very in- 
complete. The result is that the farmer is placed so 
that he cannot easily get what he would like and can 
pay for, but must accept substitutes or go without. 
This situation would be intolerable for a city man. The 
farm family accepts the handicap, carries the burden, 
becomes accustomed to the sacrifice, and suffers the 
penalty, presumably, of a standard of living lower than 
it can afford. 


70 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


INADEQUATE MerrcHanpisina Mrruops 


The farmer’s agencies of trade in the general store 
of the country cross-roads type, and in the villages lying 
about his farm, are deficient on the whole in their 
methods of merchandising. This deficiency is probably 
defensible under the circumstances, but the farmer is 
the victim. The goods cannot be handled, stored, dis- 
played, and distributed over the counter with necessary 
care and intelligent adaptation. The volume of busi- 
ness is not large enough for a single unit to warrant the 
minute attention to detail required in modern merchan- 
dising. Variety prevails without a discriminating meet- 
ing of high-class needs. One mind, one pair of hands, 
cannot attend to the wants with proper eare. The in- 
formation afforded to the buyer through modern ad- 
vertising is not possible in one of these small units. 
The farmer becomes accustomed to low-grade handling 
of goods, and accepts it, not knowing how to do better. 
He sees the difference when he goes to the city store, 
but he comes to think that city people can have such 
methods but that the farmer cannot. He does not 
know the reason. why the farmer’s store is as it is, and 
the storekeeper usually lets it go at that. The public 
generally does not care. They come to feel that the 
village is a crude business unit because the customers 
are farmers. Farming and farmers get the blame for 
unorganized selling methods in village and small town. 
There is no benevolent dictator to enter upon the scene 
and change things. So the inertia prevails, waiting until 
the moment when illumination shall come. 


WHERE THE FARM FAMILY TRADES %1 


SUPPLEMENTARY TRADING TOWNS AND CITIES 


The farm family, it is well known, leaves the villages 
on one side and travels to the large town and to the 
city on certain periodic occasions at rather long inter- 
vals for certain goods and services. People dwelling in 
cities do the same thing. The annual or semiannual 
trip to look over some very special piece of clothing, 
vehicle, implement, or to get the advice and skill of some 
famous specialist on the eye, ear, nose, throat, or some 
other organ of life, is in a class by itself. This city 
trade, in which the farmer has some share, should not be 
thought of as in any way an offset for his inadequate 
local trade facilities. It should, in fact, be kept apart 
and not confused with his regular day by day, week by 
week, opportunities. 

This is the place to mention also the farmer’s trade by 
mail, the so-called mail-order trade in the big cities. To 
mention this type of trade raises many questions, which 
need not detain us, however. Cannot the farmer get 
along without village trade when the mail-order houses 
become general? Is the mail-order house responsible for 
inadequate village merchandising? We must call atten- 
tion to the fact that the customer of the mail-order 
house is not the farm family alone but the village, 
town, and city family. The problem, if there is a prob- 
lem here, is not a farmer problem but a human problem. 
Farmers cannot be blamed if they find the mail-order 
house more satisfactory than the village store. The one 
village store may not be able to change its methods; but 
this is not to say that the village system of trade is not 


72 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


susceptible of reorganization in such wise as to make the 
mail-order business unprofitable and unnecessary. 


THE PROBLEM OF FARMER TRADE 


The problem of trade for farmers, boldly put without 
softening the blow in respect to the feelings of anybody 
concerned, is how the farm family is to come into posses- 
sion of one complete adequate local trade center. We 
may leave out of account as a minor consideration the 
present or future opportunity for the farmer to trade 
in the large city. The heart of the problem, and it is 
a massive problem, is one of consolidating the various 
trade agencies of any one group of farmers—country 
stores, hamlets, villages—into one ‘‘smashing good’’ 
farmers’ town. ‘‘Consolidation’’ is no new solution for 
farmers’ problems. ‘‘Consolidation’’ in selling prod- 
ucts of farms goes under the title of ‘‘codperation.’’ 
It has common sense back of it. It has good economic 
doctrine inside of it. It has many friends among states- 
men and some friends among the farmers themselves. 
And this type of consolidation is winning its way slowly. 
Consolidation of churches has been a well accredited 
policy put forward for remedying the oversupply of 
small, inadequate churches. Church specialists believe 
in it. Sociologists believe in it. It is difficult, very 
difficult, to effect, but it is increasing, nevertheless. 
Consolidation of rural schools is the best known type of 
overcoming the unorganized, scattered, small-scale rural 
institution. Consolidation of small country schools into 
large adequate schools with enough ‘‘volume of busi- 
ness’’ to insure good teachers, grades, effective peda- 


WHERE THE FARM FAMILY TRADES 73 


gooey, has come to stay in rural America. It has found 
its way into the law of the States and has commended 
itself to the conscience and good sense of thinking 
people. Why may we not have the consolidation of 
trade hamlets and villages into a smart town that may 
be an object of pride? 

The obstacles loom big. The small obstacles are big 
enough. But the big one? It is that in America free- 
dom to trade, freedom to set up stores, is a sacred priv- 
ilege that cannot be interfered with or conspired against. 
Schools may be forced to consolidate by law, but stores 
never. Villages may be killed by railways a mile away. 
Villages may die of dry rot. Villages may be allowed 
to impose the burden of their competition and ineffec- 
tiveness upon five thousand farm people and kill the 
progress of living. But we know of no American way, 
other than by slow death, of controlling such a trade 
unit as a village so as to consolidate it with other trade 
units. There is this to say, that no one has seriously 
thought of any plan to effect consolidation of these small 
collective units. Everybody has taken for granted that 
a village once become a village is thereby as immune from 
deliberate elimination as a human being. Let us con- 
sider a few possible ways of working out the problem of 
a model farmers’ town, as a substitute for many little 
trade places. 


SoME SUGGESTIONS ON THE PROBLEM 


There are various parties who have a vital interest 
in creating a good farmers’ town. First, there is the 
farm population, thirty million strong. There is the 


[4 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


whole manufacturing trade, which is seeking an in- 
creased domestic market for American-made goods. 
There is the Wholesale and jobbing trade, which wants a 
quick turn-over and a steady movement of goods. Here 
are three strong parties whose every interest favors a 
more facile distribution of commodities than now ob- 
tains. It is not necessary to list the opponents. Cus- 
tom and tradition endow them with inordinate power, 
however few or weak. If the agricultural press, backed 
by its manufacturing and jobbing advertisers, could 
carry on a ten-year drive of publicity, the farm popula- 
tion would begin to see clearly where to cast their 
weight. If the press of all manufacturing interests 
could join this drive of the agricultural press, and if the 
wholesalers and jobbers would also throw their strength 
into the campaign, there is no doubt about the result. 
It would at once be seen by the shrewd and far-seeing 
retail rural merchant that it behooved him to establish 
himself in the model farmers’ town. The thing would 
start. And the forces of publicity would set in motion 
other forces that would tend to bring the result about. 
This is the way of control by publicity. 

One other set of forces would come into play, namely, 
the highway forces. A farmers’ town of high quality 
would be impracticable without a highway system ra- 
diating to the farms. This system must be planned 
with all the skill of engineering. Up to the present 
time highway popularity has been with the trunk high- 
way, the interstate, the historic continental trail. The 
farmer needs a local trade highway system to support 
the idea of the farmers’ town. 


WHERE THE FARM FAMILY TRADES = %5 


Toe FARMER’S TOWN AND OTHER FARMER FACILITIES 


Five thousand up-to-date farmers’ towns, replacing 
twenty-five thousand present incomplete centers of 
trade, would do the trick of consolidation. Five 
thousand terminal towns, ‘‘terminal’’ in the sense that 
a town is at the end of a railway journey for goods, 
each town met by a complete highway system of a com- 
munity character connecting it with the twelve hundred 
farm homes belonging to it! This would provide con- 
solidated, unitary farming communities to replace the 
present hodgepodge. Already there are twenty-five hun- 
dred of these terminal towns ready to take up the re- 
sponsibility of furnishing their farmers with trade facil- 
ities, if the small competitors were eliminated by con- 
solidation. The nuclei of the other twenty-five hundred 
exist in villages already present which will bear much 
enlargement and improvement. Whether rational 
thinking has any chance in this problem may be a ques- 
tion; but surely to see the problem, to see the situation 
as it is, will aid any rationality that is possible. 

It needs only a moment’s thought to see what effect 
a real farmers’ town would have upon the problem of 
many other facilities, such as hospital, library, high 
school, entertainment. A consolidation of trade would 
inevitably bring about the consolidation for which every 
other phase of farm life is erying. Consolidation, or- 
ganization, unification! This means power for farm 
life where power is needed. If the city could once see 
what buying power would be added to the farm market, 
the city would join hands in the long-time campaign 
for consolidation. 


CHAPTER VI 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS 


O phase of farm life is more deceptive than 
N farm tenancy. It makes little difference 

whether one views it from the economic or the 
social side. In either case, while the farm tenants and 
the landlords and the land remain in plain sight and 
look simple in character, the system itself, the institution 
of tenancy in its entirety, proves strangely baffling. 

Any snap judgment upon American farm tenancy 
taken as a whole is sure to run into a maze of embar- 
rassments. This is true because the relations of tenant, 
landlord, and land partake so generously of the com- 
plications of human life itself. 

When one reads that tenancy is a menace to agricul- 
ture and American institutions and should be eliminated, 
one surmises that the writer is likely to be of the sort 
to set forth on some other occasion the doctrine that 
marriage 1s a menace to the world by reason of over- 
population and should likewise be eliminated. When, 
on the other hand, we read a stand-pat defense of farm 
tenancy as it 1s, we know the writer has either not seen 
all the types and shades of tenancy which American 
farming can show; or else he is one of those hard-baked 


persons, a little overdone and scorched maybe in the 
76 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS — 117 


process of life, who has no place in his philosophy for 
melioration. The sober student of life who knows his 
history believes that between the extreme right and the 
extreme left lies the sound position of the person who 
holds that until a sensible substitute is offered for 
tenancy, agriculture will keep on trying to better the 
conditions under which tenancy prevails. 

It is not the aim of this book to assemble and present 
the statistical side of farm tenancy in the United States. 
Nor will comparisons be attempted with European forms 
of land tenure. The United States Census material is 
very full and informing and is easily available. Books 
and bulletins are not wanting to make up a considerable 
literature upon the subject. Our purpose is to take the 
reader to a few vantage-points for observation and give 
him a broad sweep of the eye over the human side of the 
problem. 


LANDLORDS 


Who are the landlords? What is their interest in 
land? How do they come to own land? How is it 
that they do not operate it in farming? Let us quietly 
look at the human side of land-owning. 

1. Farmers. Active ‘‘dirt’’ farmers. These are 
landlords, because they have more land than they can 
operate. They may have inherited more land in one 
way and another than they can operate. They may 
have bought land, made an investment in land because 
it was valuable; or bought a farm for a son just married, 
the father becoming landlord to his son. The land- 
holding, active working farmer of this type, in the prime 


78 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


of life, likes land, likes investment in land, feels able to 
cope with the responsibilities of landownership, and for 
a few decades is a landlord. 

2. Retired farmer ; the farmer who is out of the active 
business of farming, but who retains his farm lands for 
various reasons, hope of making a good sale, provision 
for a son or daughter, sentiment tying him to his glo- 
rious past, safe investment insuring him a living in old 
age. This type of landowner knows land but may not 
know other forms of investment. Safety is an absolute 
motto. 

For a few years, possibly a decade or two, the retired 
farmer is landlord—landlord to a son or daughter, fre- 
quently. 

3. Widow of a farmer who was either active or retired. 
The farm woman who is a widow will hold the farm for 
a child who is not quite grown. She is actuated by the 
same motives as actuated the man. A daughter may 
inherit a farm and, wishing to hold the investment, will 
lease it. Sentiment may determine holding it for years. 
A son, likewise, may inherit while following another 
occupation. He may keep the farm as an investment 
or plaything. There is something in landed property 
that is enticing to the mind. A farm owned by a city 
man is a title to respect. It carries weight, with oneself, 
especially. 

4. The country gentleman, a man belonging to the 
line of landed aristocracy. He lives in the country at 
least a part of the year in a pretentious country house, 
or he lives in a plantation in sight of many tracts or 
units of land. He likes to see land blooming. He likes 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS  %9 


to see the workers in the fields, the horses and mules, 
the cattle, the country children. He lkes the rural 
ensemble, and so lives where he does, and yet lets the 
other man operate his lands. He may have other 
business in town; very likely he does have. He is a man 
of affairs. He enjoys sports of the open, the riding- 
horse, the gun, dogs. He is of the English type. Land 
fills out his personality. He needs it as an adornment 
to his career. 

5. The capitalist, the land capitalist, a man who knows 
how to make money out of land and other men’s labor, 
while he is sitting in town and doing other things, also. 
Land rented out for a year under contract is earning 
money for the landlord while he sits, sleeps, or smokes 
and dozes. In this respect it is like money lent out 
under contract. It needs little attention during the 
year. The man, therefore, who owns land and likes it, 
knows land workers and can judge them, this man is 
suited to be a land capitalist. 

6. The speculator in land. The man who, like the 
land capitalist, is a judge of land and land values and 
knows the ins and outs of land titles, but who, wishing to 
make his money by sale, may have to keep a string of 
farms on hand, operated meantime by tenants, every 
farm, however, awaiting a buyer. 

7. There are other landlords, lenders of money on 
farm mortgages, compelled, after a trial, to take over the 
farms. These are landlords against their will. 

Landlords, in general, are of two broad classes: first, 
permanent landlords, who choose the function or hold 
the function voluntarily and plan no cessation of it; 


80 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


second, temporary landlords, who are landlords by neces- 
sity or as a convenience, while seeking a cessation of the 
landlord function. 


Kinps or TENANTS 


Who are the tenants? How do they come to choose 
the tenant relation and offer to carry out the tenant 
function? Why do they not own land, if possible? 
Are there conditions in their lives and histories which 
bring compulsion to bear, forcing them to be tenants? 
Let us look these classes over and attempt to under- 
stand with sympathy and imagination their condition of 
life and their relation to land. 

1. The man or woman related to the landlord, as 
son, daughter, nephew, niece, grandson, granddaugh- 
ter, or brother or sister—usually, however, a son or 
daughter. The young man has no land, has perhaps very 
little property yet in his own right. His wife may have 
some little property by gift or inheritance. The farmer 
knows his son and trusts him as a farmer, and so con- 
tracts with him for the operation of a farm. The terms 
are frankly less difficult and exacting than with a 
stranger, simply because two functions coincide; namely, 
the father-and-son relation, which carries a presump- 
tion of inheritance and necessary assistance either of the 
father to the son or, indeed, of the son to the father; 
and the tenant-and-landlord relation and set of func- 
tions. The tenant function, blending with the son 
function, produces a unique type of land tenure. In 
fact, this type is a modus vivendi et operandi in the 
interim between landlessness and inheritance of land on 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS | 81. 


the part of the son. In like manner the blood tie, what- 
ever the relationship, comes in to modify the tenure 
functions. 

2. The man or woman unrelated to the landlord, but 
a son or daughter of a land-owning neighbor. This 
type has some of the features of the ‘‘related tenant.’’ 
Looked at closely it will be seen that the father of the 
tenant who is a neighbor to the landlord is in a sense 
Sponsor, indorser, and backer of the tenant. The will- 
ingness of the landlord to make terms and the liberality 
of the terms themselves are colored by the neighbor 
relation. The father’s character, ability, and interest 
in his son or daughter are invaluable capital for the 
son and commend him to the landlord. In this situa- 
tion, the tenant has the assistance or the potential 
assistance of the father of a character like that possessed 
by the related tenant; and this backing is taken into 
account by the landlord. The neighbor relation, more- 
over, blends with the landlord-tenant relation and func- 
tion, in the same manner as the son-and-father relation 
in the case of the related tenant. These two types of 
tenants are the privileged and highly favored ones. 

3. The landless young farmer entirely ‘‘on his own,”’ 
with no backer, no assisting family connections. He 
may have been a wage-worker until his age, experience, 
and small accumulated capital warranted his attempt to 
operate land. In place of a monetary ‘‘send-off’’ from 
the father or father-in-law, this type of young man had 
to take time to earn it. He takes to land by his bring- 
ing up. The natural turn when he comes to years of 
labor is farm work, and the natural step from wage 


82 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


work is the management of a farm under the tenant 
contract. This is a large class of the tenants and has 
several subdivisions, according as the character and 
ability and opportunity of the tenant varies. The 
major part of these young tenants struggling alone are 
looking ahead to owning land by means of an accumu- 
lated surplus. They are the climbers on the ladder of 
tenancy. Ownership is at the top. Some make the top 
quickly. Some make it eventually after a hard climb. 
Some come close to the top, but fail because of the pro- 
longation of the period until strength fails. The rest 
never come near the top, but remain static as tenants, 
or perchance drop back to the wage-earning class. The 
perpetually landless man is here. Here belongs the un- 
fortunate, the poverty-menaced family. Here is the 
marginal man, who with the pathos of struggle has 
attained some height and is always fearful of a 
fall. Rise and fall and rise again, may be the lot of 
some. 

4. The tenant capitalist. The man who knows how 
to operate land by the tenancy route to a profit. The 
man who would rather be tenant than landlord, who 
would very much rather rent than own the land he 
operates. The man who could own, but who believes 
that the amount of money which he would in a sense 
sink if he invested in ownership of land, when put 
into operating capital on somebody else’s land, will give 
him a handsome profit. This man has no sentiment 
for ownership. Farming is a money-making proposi- 
tion, and the interesting thing to note is that there is a 
type of man who can make a profit out of a relation and 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS — 83 


business function which is customarily regarded as an 
opportunity of a second or third class. 


THE FUNCTION OF THE LANDLORD 


An analysis of the responsibilities and activities of a 
normal land-owning farm operator may help us think 
out the problem of landlords and tenants and throw 
some light on the system of tenancy itself. In his ca- 
pacity as owner of his farm the farmer assumes cer- 
tain responsibilities, burdens, risks, duties—in fact, the 
functions of ownership. In his capacity of operator, 
the farmer who owns his farm-land assumes other tasks, 
risks, burdens, activities, responsibilities, or, in sum- 
mary, the functions of operating the farm. It is be- 
cause these two relations are so separable in practice 
that we are faced with the problem in a situation where 
the two functions belong to two separate persons rather 
than to one. 

Let us turn our attention for a moment to the func- 
tion of land-owning in and by itself, apart from the 
function of land operation. What are some of the 
items that go to make up this function? We shall 
no more than illustrate this angle of understanding 
the problem, leaving completer consideration for future 
treatment. 

First, capital and, possibly, credit are provided, and 
both are risked in the selection and developing of the 
landed property and in carrying the stated charges of 
taxes and costs. This provision, this risk, the owner 
of the land takes, and it becomes his function as owner. 
Certain secondary functions he takes upon himself as 


84 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


owner, for example, when he helps to fix the margins 
of economic production by his choices, when he helps 
to bring demand into adjustment with conditions, when 
he helps to fix the order of utility production, when he 
presses toward a higher surplus-producing régime. 
This is not the end of his function as owner. He may 
have to use his credit as owner to make up some deficits 
in his role as worker; his interest as owner and large 
risk-taker may induce him to improve the quality of 
his product and to reduce costs of operation which fall 
upon the land; he may as the tax-bearer and protector 
of the values in his land engage in special efforts for 
the permanent good of the community. 

These various activities grow immediately out of the 
landowner’s continuing interest in his land investment, 
and they will be the same whether he operates the land 
himself or leases his land to a tenant to operate. These 
items may be considered, therefore, as the basic function 
of the landlord, and the landlord function may be 
looked upon as a contract which somebody—and some- 
body who is able—will have to meet. So an owner 
operator is landlord to himself. A tenant operator has 
another person performing the landlord functions. 

If the landlord functions are constant, no matter who 
owns or operates the land, then, in any plan of a pri- 
vate or governmental character to modify or do away 
with the tenancy system, provision must be made for 
carrying on these functions. It will not pass economic 
muster if a plan is floated that sets a type of man up 
as an owner who is, in the nature of the case, unable to 
function as a landlord to himself, 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS ~— 85 


THE FUNCTION OF THE TENANT 


The owner of land, if he operates the land in his 
capacity of operator, land worker, and crop producer, 
has certain activities and responsibilities, which may be 
termed the function of the operator. As a man on the 
job, he assumes the task of labor and the risk attending 
the life of a worker in matters of health, strength, 
staying powers; he risks the value attached to his man- 
agerial ability and his man-labor, as he applies these 
to the particular land and farm lay-out; he furnishes 
and risks certain capital equipment in machinery and 
horse-power and in live stock. Without going further 
into the analysis of items, it is plain that the farm 
operator has his functions, and within these functions 
he has a certain scope for mental and physical powers 
of large caliber. These functions are constant, and as 
such are the same whether the worker is also owner of 
the farm or simply tenant. The function may there- 
fore be used and talked about as the tenant function. 
Whatever system shall be called upon to supersede the 
tenancy system, it cannot be expected that it will do 
away with the tenant function. 


ABUSES OF THE LANDLORD AND TENANT FUNCTIONS 


If the landlord discharges his functions perfectly, no 
landlord abuses arise. If the tenant fulfils his funce- 
tions without a hitch, no tenant abuses occur. But it 
is inconceivable that abuses should not rise. It is, 
in the first place, hardly thinkable that farm owner- 
operators may not fail as landlords to themselves or 


86 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


as tenants to themselves. The failure as landlord, if 
not met with complaint by the tenant part of his na- 
ture, may be felt by the wife or children in the house- 
hold and registered there as an abuse. If abuses or 
failures to function normally and properly occur with 
the farm owner-operator in both functions or in either 
one, much, less is it to be wondered at that landlords 
fail or abuse their function and that tenants fail and 
misuse their responsibility. 

It is necessary in understanding farm tenancy to see 
clearly how human imperfection hedges the landlord 
and the tenant round and conspires with opportunity 
to reduce the percentage of a perfect relation. Where 
one landlord measures up to ninety per cent of a com- 
plete functioning, even to the extent of assisting the 
tenant at points of deficiency lest he should fail in the 
tenant function, ten landlords are likely to fall to 
seventy-five per cent. 

The problem here is to know the pitfalls of both land- 
lord and tenant well enough to provide against and 
protect each one as much as possible in lease and in 
law and custom. Here is where progress may be ex- 
pected in America, foreseeing the causes of abuses, aim- 
ing to reduce the causes, one by one, to a minimum. 
If a man is incapable of performing the function of 
landlord to himself but can fairly well perform the 
functions of a farm operator, then it would be a poor 
oift to him to burden him with the extra function which 
he eannot perform. In all probability many existing 
owner-operators fail in their landlord function to them- 
selves and would do better in a simple tenant function, 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS _— 87 


They illustrate what would happen if all tenants had 
the landlord function also. 

The failures and abuses in the function of the tenant 
may, it is conceivable, be corrected if the function of 
the landlord in some way can be added to that of the 
tenant. It is this hope which possesses the mind of 
those who advocate landownership as a remedy for the 
failure or abuse of the tenant function, especially in 
cases where the failure or abuse of the landlord fune- 
tion on the part of the landlord coincides with the 
failure of the tenant function on the part of the tenant. 
It is believed by these advocates that ownership of 
small holdings of land by those now engaged in the 
tenant function would be an economic advance, if a 
sound way could be devised to finance the purchases 
and payments and to spread them over a long period 
of time. The serious nature of this proposal is not 
open to question. If the tenant can operate success- 
fully a large farm owned by some one else, might he 
not be capable of fulfilling the landlord function on 
a smaller holding, even though he could not on a larger? 
Would production as a whole suffer if tenants were 
thus made into owner-operators of several small hold- 
ings? Would the advance in prestige compensate for 
the loss of large-scale operation? Would tenants be 
transformed into peasants? Would the status of the 
American farmer on the whole make progress? This 
inquiry needs an answer. 

It will not escape the notice of the thoughtful person 
that the failure or abuses of either function in the case 
of actual landlords and actual tenants is part and parcel 


88 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


of the situation of the power of capital on the one hand 
and poverty on the other. That is, abuse may occur 
in the landlord function growing out of a position of 
advantage and power on the part of the landlord. 
Failure may occur in the tenant, by reason of some of 
the many influences and effects of poverty. This situa- 
tion pertains to a certain percentage of the tenants, 
for some are poor, in fact, very poor. Poverty is a 
factor in their lives; and wherever poverty comes in 
contact with capital, a situation which may be termed 
Poverty v. Wealth arises. What occurs is not so much 
a matter of land and operation of land as a matter 
of self-conscious poverty acting in close contact with 
self-conscious wealth. Where poverty-wealth behavior 
contravenes the operation of the tenancy function 
or of the landlord function, then we have a complica- 
tion of pure economics. This possibly merits a fuller 
discussion. 


POVERTY AND TENANCY 


Granting that there are several classes of tenants 
who are above poverty, it cannot fail to be recognized 
that one unfailing source of tenants is poverty. Ten- 
ancy has throughout its history been so much associated 
with poverty that some people still think that all ten- 
ants are in the grasp of poverty. 

The problem of poverty stares one in the face as he 
looks at a larger class of tenants. Their poverty mod- 
ifies their behavior and is a social disease. It makes 
itself felt as certainly as anemia in the individual. 
It has to be reckoned with apart from the land con- 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS — 89 


nection. The baffling quality here is poverty. The 
special land problem expands into the human problem. 
The basie question is this: Can poverty be stamped 
out by a special land policy? Can the opportunity 
to buy land on long time with easy payments, small 
interest, the added help of scientific advice at a nominal 
rate, transform poverty into competence? Are other 
forces necessary in this transformation? Is a special 
service required of religion, of education, of health 
forces, of recreation forces? Poverty is the problem of 
the ages, of all countries. In America, poverty floats 
over the farm tenant family perhaps even more than 
over the farm laborer. One reason is that farm ten- 
ants are married, have families; farm laborers, at least 
a great many of them, are single, young, independent. 

Race characteristics enter the tenant problem of the 
United States, especially those of the negro race. Ten- 
ancy in the Southern States is complicated by both pov- 
erty and racial issues. These considerations are not 
named to dampen any one’s ardor over a specific rem- 
edy for the failures and abuses in the functions of ten- 
ant and landlord; they are rather pointed out in order 
to enlist the thinking of others than economists in the 
problem. Economists, sociologists, moralists, social 
psychologists, many specialists, are involved in so com- 
plex a situation as the one created by poverty and 
race. 

Regional differences in respect to tenants and land- 
lords are striking, and the deadly parallel of comparison 
is illuminating. A composite picture of each of the 
various regional tenant-landlord situations would aid 


90 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


any student or any theorist to balance his thinking: 
leases—both the letter and the practice—housing and 
living conditions, costs of living, regionally compared; 
the analysis of landlord functions as carried out in 
practice, compared State by State, region by region; 
the tenant functions compared. Such methods of view- 
ing will help to get clues to better adjustments. The 
clear segregation of an abuse or a failure from its 
milieu of entanglements is ninety per cent of the way 
to a better adjustment. 


By-propucts oF TENANCY 


An exhaustive understanding of landlords and ten- 
ants will discover many by-products of the whole sys- 
tem of farm tenancy. These resultant factors, in some 
cases, may turn out to be more far-reaching for good or 
ill than the immediate effects of tenancy upon tenants. 

The failure of the landlord function toward the farm 
community and the county in which the farm is 
located, is worth looking at a moment. When the 
owner-operator discharges his landlord function toward 
his farm community or county, his public spirit is 
strengthened by the personal motives of a family of 
children to be reared to American manhood and woman- 
hood. Human nature betrays lines of weakness when 
it comes to expenditures of any kind for a public enter- 
prise that does not directly and immediately include 
the proposed donor. It is this fact that causes many 
an owner-operator to fail in his function of supporter 
of his community. He may have no children, or his 


LANDLORDS AND FARM TENANTS — 91 


children may be grown; and the auxiliary motive urg- 
ing him to a one hundred per cent functioning in public 
matters is wanting. Much more is this true when the 
landlord is an absentee, when his family is utterly re- 
moved from the land and community. Failure here 
often becomes actual abuse of the landlord function 
toward the community. A substitute, moreover, must 
be found for the family motive as a reinforcement of 
the function toward the community in ease of the absen- 
tee landlord. 

When title to land—that is, actual ownership—leaves 
the farm community and moves to the city and to city 
industry, there is another by-product of tenancy that 
needs most careful consideration and analysis. This 
situation amounts to a drainage of surplus profits, 
dividends, or accumulations, from the land and away 
from the agricultural population to cities and city in- 
dustry. The seriousness of this state of affairs is hid- 
den. It needs bold statement and candid disclosure. 
Surplus accumulations tend to embellish, enrich, or 
surround the community with comfort and refinement. 
A surplus will express itself in houses, not so much 
- better ones, although they will be better, as more ample, 
beautiful, distinctive ones. Surplus will gradually 
from generation to generation manifest itself in the 
improved appearance of homesteads, farmsteads, but 
especially in institutions. Surplus gives art. Surplus 
brings the appliances for more pleasure. When sur- 
plus is constantly drained off to cities, the country-side 
is left barren. The country then is considered only 
aS an economic implement, a tool to be kept in order, 


92 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


but not a medium for the expression of human refine- 
ments. 

The accompaniment of this drainage of surplus to 
the city is the creed and public doctrine that the city 
is the place for amenities, for the embodiment of the 
subtler and finer thoughts, through the transformation 
of surpluses. Is this true? Must there not be a re- 
canvass of this creed? Is there not due to the country 
and the rural community an undrained-off surplus 
which is to be turned into beauty and meliorations for 
the people who sweat for bread and live there? 

Here is where the tenancy system presents a problem 
very grave indeed. With all the rural effort for in- 
stitutions and for beauty in landscape, if more and more 
the drainage of surplus continues through the hands 
of the absentee city landlord, what hope is there? 
England’s country life has its refinements because the 
English landlord did build and maintain an establish- 
ment in the country. The castle or ‘‘great house,’’ the 
parks, the paved roads, gave back to rural England 
the values of some of its surplus. If rural England 
is to lose its country refinements by the break-up of 
its estates, it will face the same situation as America 
has in its artless rural life. 

A fresh, unbigoted review of American landlordism 
and tenancy, not omitting the by-products, will serve 
to throw light upon almost every phase of American 
rural life, just because its features penetrate so far 
into rural society and into national progress. 


CHAPTER VII 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 


MERICA believes in high schools for towns and 
cities with the same kind of belief that she be- 


lieves in elementary schools. The proof is in 
two facts: on the one hand the fact that virtually all 
towns and cities possess high schools; on the other, that 
every square inch of the incorporated area of such 
towns and cities is within some high-school district and 
is taxed for the support of high schools. Evidently 
America, however, is not yet committed so whole- 
heartedly to high schools for its farm people; and the 
proof is perhaps not so much in the fewness of rural 
high schools, though this fewness is startling, as in the 
fact that so inconsiderable a part of the land area out- 
side of towns and cities is within high-school districts 
and subject to tax for high-school purposes. 

This situation, clear as it is, bald as it is, staring us 
in the face as it does, cannot but raise in the minds of 
thinking citizens the question whether, from the social 
point of view, America, in allowing this frontier con- 
dition to hang like a mist around farm life from decade 
to decade, is not storing up trouble for herself. A 
rural social problem of high national import is involved 
in this contrast between urban and rural educational 
ideals. 

93 


94 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


Tue EpucaATIONAL IDEAL OF FARMERS 


The colonial farmer—and it will be remembered that 
the original colonist was in nearly every case a farmer 
—possessed a high educational ambition for his family. 
The presence in New England, from the earliest day, 
of the so-called academy, an institution of a private or 
corporate character higher than the elementary school, 
and in fact in instances giving some subjects of college 
gerade, is evidence of this high educational rural ideal. 
The New England academy traveled with the New 
England farm settlers into New York, Pennsylvania, 
and Ohio. 

But as time went on and the racial character of the 
farm population changed through immigration, the 
rural supporters of the academy began to dwindle. Then, 
too, the towns and cities commenced their phenomenal 
growth, and the urban citizens came into control of the 
academic institutions; and shortly high schools, sup- 
ported by tax, supplanted the private and corporate 
academies. Whereupon the American farm'er—a far 
different type from the original, it must be admitted— 
apparently did not think it wise to go to the length 
of creating a high-school district and taxing his land 
and properties for such a school. Nor was the city 
keen, for some reason or other, to see high schools in 
the country. So it was educators who began to point 
out the desirability of high-school education for farm 
children. It was educators who asked for consolidation 
of elementary rural schools, and the attachment of 
rural high schools to these consolidated units. Under 
the stimulus of educational doctrine, certain progressive 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 95 


farm communities in every State have created high- 
school districts, taxed themselves for maintenance, and 
come to believe as heartily in high schools for their 
children as city people do for city children. 

Certain States, like Utah and California, by making 
the compulsory age of children include the eighteenth 
year, have set a seal of approval upon high-school edu- 
cation for the children of farmers as well as of other 
classes. 

The Smith-Hughes Law, moreover, which appropri- 
ates federal money for the teaching of agriculture in 
schools, has been anaqther influence of considerable 
power strengthening the idea of high schools for farm- 
ers. The development of agricultural science in the ex- 
periment stations of the States, and its dissemination 
through the extension agencies of federal and state 
government, has brought the best agricultural practice 
up to such heights that the most natural thing in the 
world is to teach farm boys and girls this modern 
science of agriculture in high school. 

It has been thought by some thinkers and writers 
whose ideas on rural life have commanded attention 
and favor that the salvation of the American farm com- 
munity from disintegration and decadence is to come 
about by the redirection and rehabilitation of the 
farmers’ elementary schools. This view, however, has 
usually overlooked a fact of prime importance; namely, 
that children attending the elementary school, much as 
they may absorb from school, are too young to appre- 
ciate the kind of training that farm communities es- 
pecially need in order to save them from disintegration. 


96 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


In a child, however, the high-school age is the age of 
social awakening, the age of new ideals, the age of adap- 
tation and adjustment to potent points of view. Much 
therefore as a ‘‘redirected’’ elementary school may con- 
tribute to a modernized country life, still it seems true 
that the farmer cannot emerge from frontier organiza- 
tion until he has incorporated the high school into his 
educational system. 


THe FarMeER’s High ScHOOL AND GRADE SCHOOLS 
CoOPERATING 


When high-school districts shall cover every inch of 
America, even as do now elementary or so-called grade- 
school districts, then all farmers will have control or a 
measure of control of some high school even as now of 
grade schools. Such high schools may be situated in 
villages, towns, or small cities, or they may be in the 
open country; but at all events the farmers’ lands will 
be in the district and will be taxed for the support of 
the high school. Evidently also a certain number of 
grade schools and grade-school districts will be found 
within. the high-school district, unless indeed the little 
schools have all been collected into one large grade 
school, even as all the children of high-school age are 
collected into one high school. The question at this 
point is, how ean the high school codperate with its 
own grade schools; or how, to put the matter the other 
way, can the grade schools codperate with the high 
school ? 

It is not sufficient to say that the grade schools will 
send pupils after graduation to the high school. The 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 97% 


fact is, when one looks the situation in the face, the 
grade schools and the high school are a unit. They 
are the exponents of the educational ideals of the com- 
munity. Grade teachers are preparing scholars for high 
school in about the same way as teachers within the 
high school teaching second-year subjects are prepar- 
ing pupils for the third-year subjects. Community 
statesmanship will in the advanced community arrange 
cooperative measures between the high school on the 
one hand and the grade schools on the other. 

Let us assume that each grade school has its board 
of school trustees. This board is guiding the destinies 
and utilizing the resources of its little district or neigh- 
borhood. But the high school also has a board which 
looks out from a higher vantage-point for the higher 
educational interests of all the little districts within 
its large high-school district. Could there possibly be 
a more rational step in cooperation than for the estab- 
lishment of a voluntary (that is, non-governmental) 
association of school trustees including all trustees of 
the grade-school districts and the trustees of the high 
school? An instance is the ‘‘Constitution of the As- 
sociation of School Trustees of the Chaffey Union High 
School District,’’ Ontario, California. It has been in 
effective operation for several years, and is as follows: 


Article I. Name. 

The name of this organization shall be “The Association of 
School Trustees of the Chaffey Union High School District.” 
Article II. Membership. 

Any school trustee of any district sending students to the 
Chaffey Union High School District or any member of the 


98 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


high-school board shall be eligible to membership in the As- 
sociation. The,County Superintendent shall be an ex-officio 
member. School principals shall be associate members. 
Article III. Officers. 

The officers of this association shall consist of President, 

Vice-President and Secretary. 
Article IV. Purpose of the Association. 

The purpose of this association is the advancement of all 
the educational interests of all the districts represented through 
codperation among the districts. 


The unity of the high-school work and the grade- 
school work in the Chaffey Union High School district 
is made evident to a stranger by the following facts: 

The high school furnishes instruction in certain 
special branches to the grade-school children through 
its own high-school teachers, who either go from grade 
school to grade school, or teach the children at the high 
school after the high-school bus has brought the children 
to the high-school buildings. The branches taught in 
this way are manual training, domestic science, band 
and orchestra music, scouting, athletics, agriculture. In 
one instance the high-school board has constructed with 
its own funds a small building as an annex to one grade 
school for the domestic science teaching. 

It is not a matter of astonishment to the visitor to find 
this particular high school a real community center of 
intellectual pursuits and a center of agricultural im- 
provement, when he understands the measure of ¢o- 
operation among the school-board trustees of the 
community. 

In a community where the high-school board of 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS = 99 


trustees is willing to codperate with the grade-school 
boards, it ought not to be a difficult step for the high- 
school teachers and the grade-school teachers to form 
a circle of mutual advantage and benefits. What an 
opportunity for a high-school principal to vitalize a 
community to its very fringes is afforded by a voluntary 
association of all the teachers of all the schools in the 
high-school district! Such rural community leadership 
—what a chance for tact, for humanism, for in-reach 
into the places to which people withdraw with their 
power and resources !—is the sort held by the old school- 
masters, physicians, and clergymen. But this point of 
view is not the last word on what high schools can do 
for agriculture and farm life. There is a very practi- 
eal high-school method of bringing school thinking to 
bear upon community life and problems. 


THE SmirH-HuGcHes TEACHERS OF AGRICULTURE 
AND THEIR PROBLEM 


~ The Smith-Hughes teachers of agriculture,’ so called, 
while occupying strategic places in the nation for assist- 
ine agriculture and farm life, have a by no means 
rosy path of duty. Tey need to be specially fortified 
with wisdom and common sense and human understand- 
ing, over and above their technical training. To teach 
in high school sons of farmers how to farm, when the 
sons go home every night where the struggle to farm 
is the bread-and-butter struggle of life, is a very ticklish 

1 Smith-Hughes teachers of agriculture are under the control 
of the Federal Board of Vocational Education. Schools employ- 


ing such teachers participate in Federal funds under the Smith- 
Hughes Act of Congress. 


100 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


procedure. It is teaching on the front line under fire. 
It is far easier to teach in the agricultural college, a 
hundred miles away from the farm. It is easier by 
far to make a one-night stand of teaching in a farm- 
extension school, and then beat a retreat to the college 
of agriculture or go on to another community. The 
Smith-Hughes teacher must face every day those whose 
farm practices he is trying to improve and must live 
with them day by day. He has fewer means of escape, 
even, than the county agricultural agent. The hardness 
of the task is mentioned, not to frighten the teacher or 
even cause him to watch his step, but rather as an intro- 
duction to a method of solving his problem and making 
him happy through success. 


1. BEGIN WITH THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE COMMUNITY 


The economic and social accomplishments of the fam- 
ilies of the high-school district—or the area from which 
the children come, if the county system prevails and 
there is no legal school district—the accomplishments 
and achievements of this community make a good 
starting-point. To collect and inventory, to recite and 
count up the annual production of the community, farm 
by farm, family by family, is a wise procedure. It gets 
the situation down in black and white at the commence- 
ment. It gives credit where credit is due for the 
kinds of farm enterprise, the prevailing farm practice, 
the acreage dealt with and worked over, the yields, and 
the income. What agriculture produces and amounts 
to in a year, if the teacher is going to help improve it, 
must certainly be assumed, if not known. It should 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 101 


better not be simply assumed, but known; better openly 
known, made a serious endeavor, a worthy statistical 
search; better still is a codperative search among stu- 
dents, teacher, and farmers themselves. To induct the 
Smith-Hughes teacher into the method of sizing up the 
economic and social condition of his high-school com- 
munity and of utilizing the results in his teaching and 
in his contacts with the community will now be our aim. 


2. GETTING THE GRADE ScHOOLS INTERESTED IN THE 
INVENTORY 


Let us suppose there are six grade-school districts in 
the high-school area, that in this area are sixty-four 
Square miles and three hundred farms, that in each 
grade-school district are fifty farms and fifty farm 
homes. The problem of taking the inventory of three 
hundred farms and homes the first year and perhaps 
also the second, but especially the first, is rather large 
considering that there may be no precedent. Not only 
must new things be done, but parents and farmers and 
teachers must be convinced that the idea is worth while. 

As the first step, early in the year—if possible, in 
the first two weeks of school—the Smith-Hughes teacher 
will, let us say, invite all the grade-school teachers to 
dinner. After dinner he will propose his plan, where- 
by each school shall make a small inventory of crop, 
animal, and other accomplishments of its own district 
during the past year. He will explain that this inven- 
tory when finished will be used by each grade school 
and also be made available for use in his own teaching 
in the high school. The teachers will be advised to get 


102 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the consent and backing of their school boards to the 
plan before starting in. The plan as a whole will be. 
something after this fashion. 

After the grade-school teachers have the consent and 
indorsement of their school boards to go ahead, they 
will meet with the Smith-Hughes teacher a second time 
and decide upon just what most important crops, 
animals, machinery, and household conveniences they 
will inventory. This is for the purpose of having a 
uniform set of items that will allow summarizing for 
the whole high-school area. Evidently there will be 
fifty reports for the fifty farms of each grade school, 
one report to a farm. Before the reports are filled in, 
the fifty blank sheets will be all alike. There will be 
a place for the name of the farmer, possibly also for 
each member of his family, with the age of each; a place 
for the total number of acres in the farm; places for 
the number of acres of several of the chief crops, such 
as oats, corn for ensilage, hay, sugar-beets, pasture. 
There will be places for the yields of the past year, such 
as bushels of oats, tons of ensilage, tons of hay, tons of 
sugar-beets, number of stock provided with pasturage. 
There will be an inventory of all the live stock, such 
as number of dairy cows, number of young stock, num- 
ber of horses, number of hogs, number of young pigs. 
Then certain pieces of machinery will be so significant 
in farming that a list will be made of these, and a check- 
mark will be made after every piece that is present on 
a farm, such as tractor, silo, manure-spreader, litter- 
carrier, automobile, truck. The household conveniences 
that are regarded as specially helpful will be listed, such 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 103 


as running cold water in the kitchen, running hot 
water in the kitchen, bath-room with modern bath-tub, 
electric lights, kitchen cabinet, modern kitchen sink. 
Checks will be made after such of these as are present. 

The Smith-Hughes teacher will be so interested in 
this inventory that he will agree to furnish the printed 
or mimeographed sheets of the schedules, fifty to a 
school. This will be a great help to the grade teachers 
and will insure uniformity. 

When the schedules are ready and in the hands of 
the grade-school teacher, she will explain what is wanted 
to a selected number of her school-children. Each such 
child will be asked to get the facts for his farm and 
home on a particular day and to bring the schedule, 
all filled in, back to the school. There will probably 
be farms and homes in the school district having no 
children in school. The teacher will select children to 
visit these farm homes and get the information. It 
may be necessary for the teacher herself to visit some 
farm inaccessible to the children, in order to get the in- 
formation for every farm. 

This stage of the process will not and must not be 
slighted. The value of the whole plan depends upon 
the care and accuracy of these results. If the facts are 
all accurate, then the summary for the whole grade- 
school district will be a piece of real news for the farm- 
ers themselves and will be appreciated. The sum- 
mary or totals of the figures for the fifty farms may be 
the work of arithmetic classes. At any rate, the 
teacher, after checking up to the best of her ability 
the general trustworthiness of the separate schedules, 


104 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


possibly with the aid of one of the members of her school 
board, will work out the summary on a separate sheet 
and have a copy made for each of the other grade-school 
teachers and one for the Smith-Hughes teacher. 

After the several inventories have been completed, 
summarized, and handed to the Smith-Hughes teacher, 
he will call these teachers together again, and they will 
consider as a group how these facts may be utilized by 
each grade-school teacher in her school. He may trust 
the ingenuity of the teachers to grasp quickly how the 
facts may be used in arithmetic, English, and physiol- 
ogy. He can show them how the drawing class may 
make a map of the grade-school district, and plat the 
fifty farms, and then make various spot maps to repre- 
sent the crops. A corn map, wheat map, oat map, pig 
map, poultry map, will soon follow. All the Smith- 
Hughes teacher does the first year in perfecting the 
process of getting the simple inventory and utilizing the 
facts in the grade school will be just so much done in 
preparing the pupils who later come up to high school. 
But the presentation of this inventory method here 
is with a view to solving the Smith-Hughes teacher’s 
problems in the high school itself. 


3. UTILIZING THE INVENTORY IN HianH ScHooL 


The Smith-Hughes teacher may have from twenty 
to forty students studying agriculture with him. They 
will be the brothers and sisters of boys and girls in the 
grade schools. They will be in different years of the 
course. While the high-school teacher is waiting for 
the results of the inventory from the grade schools, he 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 105 


will begin with the groups of his own students, ac- 
cumulating a set of facts pertaining to the whole high- 
school district; for it will be remembered that he not 
only is to make his own acquaintance with his environ- 
ing farms and homes, but is to lead his students on 
from this acquaintance as a starting-point in the general 
study of agriculture. 

The first object to be attained in the preliminary 
view of the whole district is a base map of the school 
district. Presumably the map ean be obtained in an 
up-to-date atlas of the county, and then enlarged to a 
scale of four or five inches to the mile. The boundaries 
of the high school can be had from the clerk of the 
high-school district. The farm homes should all be rep- 
resented on the base map; also highways, large streams, 
railways, school-houses, and churches. 

The base map will be made as earefully as possible 
and as accurately as may be. A second map will be 
needed; this is a plat map of the farms of the high- 
school district. On the first map as a base, every farm 
will be laid. It is possible that such a map of the whole 
county exists. If so, it will be an easy matter to copy 
the platting of the high-school district. A little atten- 
tion will rectify this older map and bring it up to date. 
If no plat map exists, still it will be worth while to go 
to the pains of platting the farms. This will be a long 
job and will be parceled out among the boys as minor 
projects. The deeds of the farms will contain the 
boundary lines, and these lines will be transferred to 
the map. The difficulty of constructing this map will 
not deter a real teacher from doing it. But maps do 


106 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


not stop with the plat map of the high-school district. 
There will also be a geological map. From the United 
States Geological Survey at Washington may be ob- 
tained, for many counties, geological maps. The part 
of the county map that includes the high-school district 
may be copied in an enlarged form upon the base map 
of the high-school district. This may be colored and 
made to conform perfectly to the geological map. Still 
another map is necessary, a soil map of the high-school 
district. Many counties have available their soil maps. 
These may be obtained from the Government at Wash- 
ington and copied. If a soil survey has not been made 
yet of the teacher’s county, he will start the making of 
a rough survey in codperation with his class, and the 
outcome will furnish the soil map, which will suffice 
until a better one takes its place. Improvements or 
modifications will be made as the year goes on. In cer- 
tain parts of the country, a water or irrigation map 
of the high-school district will be made as one of the 
uniform set of maps. During the year the idea of 
mapping certain graphic facts will become a habit; and 
no better way of presenting certain facts of the whole 
school district can be devised than mapping. As the 
facts become known, such maps as a woodland map, a 
pasture map, an orchard map, a corn map, an unim- 
proved land map, can be made. 

When the crop, animal, machinery, and household 
convenience inventory arrives from the grade schools, 
then the teacher will face the utilization of the facts 
gathered. One of the first uses will be translating the 
statistical facts of the inventory into map form. Spot 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS 107 


maps of bushels of wheat, tons of hay, tons of silage will 
be constructed for the whole high-school district. These 
maps would contain the outlines of the several grade- 
school districts and so show the comparative production 
of the different grade-school districts. This graphic 
presentation will draw attention more quickly to the 
salient likenesses and differences of production in the dis- 
trict. The average yields to the acre will be worked 
out, and these yields will be the basis of comparison with 
exceptional yields on individual farms. It will be the 
most natural thing in the world to give special students 
a project; namely, to survey or gather together minute 
details of the farm practice of farmers who had the 
yields by the acre which arise in discussion. The ways 
of utilizing the inventory will appear so varied, so vital, 
so self-evident to a live teacher that it is deemed un- 
necessary here to make further suggestions. 


4, UTILIZING THE UNITED STATES CENSUS 


It would be little short of a great evasion of duty not 
to mention one further way of getting knowledge of 
the high-school district; such a knowledge, too, as will 
aid the teacher in facing the fathers of the sons in 
school. The United States Census of Agriculture for 
any State contains several tables which display facts 
about crops, values of crops; animals, values of animals; 
lands, values of land, for every county. Even though 
the latest census report may be several years old and 
in a sense out of date, nevertheless it is of great value 
as a beginning for thinking about the productiveness 
and values of the county. While it is important, more- 


108 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


over, for the teacher to know these census facts about 
the county, and to use them with his students, familiar- 
izing them with the United States Census, there is an- 
other use of the county facts that is specially important. 
This is, in brief, to reduce the county tables to the high- 
school district basis. Let us explain more definitely. 

The teacher will assume—he must make the assump- 
tion in order to carry out this plan—that the production 
and values of his high-school district maintained the 
Same average yields of crops, ete., as the county as a 
whole. He therefore will find what fractional part 
the improved land of the high-school district is of the 
improved land of the county, and will make a new set 
of tables for the high-school district, by multiplying 
every item in the census county tables by this fraction. 
Thus, for example, if the high-school district is one 
thirtieth of the area of the county, then the wheat 
yield of the district is one thirtieth of that of the 
county. The teacher will make high-school district 
tables, comparable with the county tables, and bring 
them to his students as a start in thinking. In the 
first place, these tables will need correction and modifi- 
cation in several respects. It may take some little time 
to complete this correction and modification. For ex- 
ample, some things raised in other parts of the county 
may not be raised at all in the high-school district. 
Other things may be raised much more largely in the 
high-school district than in the county at large. It 
becomes a task, therefore, to modify the second set and 
finally get a third set of tables for the particular cen- 


AGRICULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOLS = 109 


sus year, like 1920, for the high-school district, a set 
of tables that will be as near to the facts as may be 
estimated. This set of tables will always be subject 
to revision as new facts require. 

A fourth set of tables comparable with the third set 
will also be made by the teacher, namely, for the year 
just ended. That is, the third set of tables will be cor- 
rected and due allowance made for the different cir- 
cumstances of the last year and of the census year in 
coming to a fourth set of tables. Here is where the 
actual inventory, or survey, if you prefer to call it so, 
made by the grade schools becomes of great value. It 
will be a guide to the making of the complete fourth 
set of tables, even in regard to matters not included in 
the inventory. This fourth set of tables will be under 
fire all the year and subject to revision. 

Such a system of statistics, assumed as they must be, 
corrected as best can be, revised when found possible, 
is one of the best expedients for getting students of 
high-school age accustomed to the economies of farm 
practice and to the social point of view in production. 
The method is pedagogically correct. It brings the 
interest element into the new field and sharpens every 
sense and faculty of the student when challenged by 
the scientific ideas set forth. 

The every-day utilization of the United States Cen- 
sus reports of agriculture and farm population, as ap- 
plied to the local high-school area, will bring the cen- 
sus down to the farmer as no other use ever can. 
When the ordinary farmer, father of the boy in high 


110 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


school, sees that the agricultural teacher is basing his 
teaching and his thinking upon the best facts about the 
production of the high-school area, his respect for what 
the teacher does and says will be enhanced, and his 
tendency to criticism turned into cooperation. 


CHAPTER VIII 


AGRICULTURE AND HOSPITALS 


6 URAL health’? competes with ‘‘rural educa- 
R tion’’ for space in the American press. The 
threadbare myth of ‘‘Farm Women Crowding 
the Insane Asylums’’ in time gave way to the fable 
of the ‘‘Terrible Lesson in the Rural Draft Statisties.’’ 
Lately the ‘‘Rural Adenoid’’ has threatened to reduce 
somewhat the public’s fear for the general health of 
farm people, restore the old-time serenity of the public, 
and establish once more their reliance upon fresh air, 
sunshine, quiet, space, and sleep in the country to work 
the charm of rural health. 

Meanwhile a quiet work has been going on under the 
lead of private foundations for the eradication of hook- 
worm and pellagra; and there has been a modest cam- 
paign on the part of the United States Health Service 
in collaboration with state boards of health for remedy- 
ing here and there pathologic rural conditions coming 
within the field especially of. sanitation. A county 
nurse, moreover, in many rural counties has performed 
her varied tasks of inspection of school-children, pub- 
licity of health rules, and general health counsel for 
communities. The tuberculosis scout has been on the 


lookout among farm people. A few national religious 
111 


112 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


bodies have even established ‘‘health centers’’ and hos- 
pitals in a few seattered mountain localities; and, won- 
derful to say, a few States, with special reference to 
their rural people, have made it possible for counties 
which so desire to establish county hospitals. Few 
counties have so desired, it must be added. 

Standing between the two extreme views that farm 
people are, on the one hand, in wretched health, and, on 
the other hand, that they are exponents of perfect health, 
are many intelligent agencies grappling with the tremen- 
dous problem of rural health. To the experienced on- 
looker and observer, however, rural health thinking 
and rural health measures, whether of a private or of 
a public nature, are passing through stages comparable 
with the progress of rural education in the past. Until 
a broad national program of education and educational 
facilities was thought out for farm people as a con- 
stituent element of our nation, palliatives, makeshifts, 
and unconnected plans and policies were in vogue and 
practice. Rational public rural educational ideals had 
to work their way up between two positions: first, that 
farmers could not assimilate education of a high type; 
second, that the education they were getting was good 
enough and sufficient for the type of work they did and 
the idyllic life they led. As the educational program 
of the broad rural educator is in a fair way to permeate 
farm life, so let us hope that a rational program will 
come to prevail with respect to rural health. 

A consolidation of rural health intelligence, interest, 
technic, and statesmanship is an imperative need. Con- 
fessedly one county nurse, even though maintained at 


AGRICULTURE AND HOSPITALS = 118 


public expense, is only a small palliative of disease con- 
ditions among the twenty thousand people of a county. 
An investigation of sanitary appliances in one small 
community of a State goes only a little way into cor- 
rective policy for the nation. Even hook-worm, bad as 
it is, and pellagra, distressing as it is, are either re- 
stricted regionally or to an economic class. A broad 
health policy for thirty millions of farm people, a policy 
which shall include the normal as well as the subnormal 
occurrences of daily living, the constant event of mater- 
nity among all economic classes of farmers, the in- 
evitable accidents of life, the sweep of contagions, the 
perversions of internal physiologic organisms, is the 
pressing problem of health among farm people. 

It is the purpose of the present discussion to present 
the hospital as the key to this broad program of State 
and nation. 


HospiIrats THE Key To RurAL HEALTH 


The nation believes in hospitals. The hospital move- 
ment has captured the thinking public—for cities, as 
a city institution, like a wholesale coffee-house or a 
museum of art. Not only must the city now possess 
the hospital as an institution, but it must be avail- 
able for all city people, rich and poor. It seems 
to have achieved such an economic adjustment be- 
tween the sources of money and the needs of the poor 
that no one within cities is barred ; and, moreover, every- 
body in the cities knows about the hospital, just as he 
knows about the physician. And the physician is re- 
lated to the hospital. So popular, moreover, is the hos- 


114 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


pital in cities that, like the high school, it has difficulty 
in bringing its facilities up, in respect to building, 
laboratories, and personnel of staff, to the demand. 
High schools in cities are notoriously overcrowded; 
hospitals, likewise. The popularity of the hospitals, 
whether of a general or specialized character, means 
that the hospital is as a facility or health convenience 
an institution of health, and the key to the general 
health or disease situation; just as the high school, as 
an educational institution, is the key to higher educa- 
tion in the city. Schooling has been taken out of the 
home and dwelling-house and allocated to high-school 
buildings, a policy of great economy and efficiency. So 
in cities care of disease has been lifted from the home, 
house, and family and taken to the hospital, where are 
assembled all the equipment and skill for combating 
disease. 

The modern answer to human disease in cities, in so 
far as the answer is really made, is the hospital. Hos- 
pitals, whether general or specialized, carry along with 
them laboratories, clinics, dispensaries. The hospital 
idea, in other words, is the organized effort of health 
agencies for effective treatment of disease. Even med- 
ical specialisms, like that for eye, ear, throat, and teeth, 
are relating themselves more and more to hospital treat- 
ment. If the dormitory is not a necessity in a line of 
treatment, then the hospital feature goes on alone with- 
out dormitories. 

Thirty millions of farm people have their broad health 
problem, even as they have their educational problem. 
The almost total absence of a broad hospital policy for 


AGRICULTURE AND HOSPITALS 115 


farmers is the clearest indication that the public has 
not grappled yet with the rural health problem. The 
hospital is the key to the health problem. 


BELONGING TO FARM PEOPLE 


It has doubtless occurred to the reader that many farm 
people already employ the hospital facilities of cities 
and that city hospitals are open to farm people on equal 
terms with city people. Yes, unquestionably, just 
as in educational matters, years ago, many farmers sent 
their children away from home to city high schools. 
They were the farmers who could afford, and while 
affording had a strong enough educational ideal to over- 
come all the difficulties involved, and were living also 
within access of a high school that happened to have 
room; but the sum total of such farmers was almost 
negligible when we take into account the total number 
of farm children. 

It has been mentioned that city hospitals are crowded 
already. It is necessary only to say that in order to 
care for the thirty millions of farm people, allowing one 
bed to two hundred and fifty persons, it will take about 
one hundred and twenty thousand hospital beds, that 
is, forty beds on an average to the county, for the whole 
United States. In order to meet the situation and give 
the rural people a health policy and a complete health 
program, they must have a system of hospitals belong- 
ing to themselves, a system in which they shall, at least, 
have as much control and special ownership as they 
have in their system of schools. To sum the matter 
up succinctly, the city has enough of its own people to 


116 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


fill its hospitals, and the country must begin to establish 
hospitals of its*own. 


ADAPTED TO RURAL CONDITIONS 


A plan to meet the health needs of farm people with 
hospitals confronts the necessity of adapting them to 
rural conditions. Nearly all modernized institutions 
for rural people have had to meet the problem of adap- 
tation. The scattered condition of rural residence is 
the one great circumstance, different from the city, 
which necessitates changes in the structure and organ- 
ization of rural social institutions. Modern rural 
education met by public transportation this distance 
element involved in a large school. Improvement of the 
roads used by the school buses was a second element 
of adaptation. ‘‘Teacherages’’ were a third adaptation. 
In some instances county administration of rural 
schools has been a fourth adaptation. 

In like manner, it is quite plain that a system of 
hospitals which shall completely cover the rural field 
will need to take into account several of the facts that 
uniquely characterize country living. In the first place, 
in order to get the volume of business required for a 
hospital as a going concern, the hospital will need to 
adapt itself to a wide spread of territory. Doubtless 
the county area in many cases will be needed in order 
to support a rural hospital. A county having twenty- 
five thousand persons living outside of cities of twenty- 
five thousand people will probably need a single hospital 
of one hundred beds. 

In the second place, the location of the hospital will 


AGRICULTURE AND HOSPITALS 117 


be a question requiring more careful adaptation to a 
variety of circumstances than the location of a city 
hospital. It must be accessible to the largest number 
of its constituency. At the same time it must be 
situated with some regard to the presence of active 
physicians. It will reckon on the opening to its people 
of modern highways. 

In the third place, it may be necessary to organize 
partial units or adjuncts to hospital units at out-of-reach 
places. In fact, the working plan of a rural hospital 
program will require some experimentation, special ef- 
fort. The man who ean be the architect of a set of 
properly adjusted rural hospital units will gain a place 
and name in American history. 


AMBULANCE SERVICE 


How far we have to go 1n bringing rural health to 
the nation by the way of a fully equipped hospital serv- 
ice 18 made apparent when we suggest that the ambu- 
lance service will be as ready, immediate, and efficient 
for the farmer as for the city man. Why should we 
think it incongruous to suppose that an ambulance will 
be ready for a quick twenty-mile drive to an isolated 
farm? Here is where the highway problem intersects 
the hospital program. 


Some REASSURING INSTANCES 


We are not wholly at sea on the matter of rural 
hospitals. Many thoughts have been spoken. Many 
statistics have been prepared. Much urging and 
preaching has been done. Several instances of wonder- 


118 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


ful rural community hospitals have been given space in 
the press. So far has the matter gone that several 
States have passed laws permitting counties to establish 
hospitals. Some counties have accepted the privilege 
and begun to show what the hospital means for farm- 
ers. Rural education had its indigenous modern schools. , 
Trial laws for consolidation of schools were enacted. 
These broke the ice of custom and started people to 
think. Soon the frontier in education began to break 
up, and modern life began to show itself in rural 
schools. 

It is not bold, therefore, to predict the day when the 
farmer shall have his hospital and when one more 
bridge shall have been built from the frontier to the 
modern level of living. 


CHAPTER IX 
AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES 


URING the late war a cablegram came from 
France announcing, ‘‘In northern France 
three hundred rural churches, sanctuaries of 

the peasant farmers, lie in heaps of tumbled stone.”’ 
They were, the cable reports, ‘‘the quaintly beautiful 
altars, devoted in many cases for three centuries to the 
constant worship of God. lLowly in stature, but tower- 
ing above the modest houses and cottages about it, the 
farmer’s church in lovely France was a holy object of 
sacred memory. The bell in its tower has sounded the 
angelus from time out of mind. Heard afar in beet- 
field or vineyard, waited for as a daily part of many a 
simple, beautiful, pious life, the bell tolled out; the 
farmer, hoe in hand, ceased toil for a moment, made 
the sign of the cross, and bowed the head in prayer. 
Beneath the tower the farmer had been baptized; the 
bell had rung his marriage peal; it would toll at his 
burial as it had for his father before him, as it would 
for his children after him. More than ancient stone 
lies crumbled, more than stained glass windows, more 
than paintings, and objects of symbolic art. Desecrated 
and wrecked le the holy tablets of sacred memory of 
a vast farm population.’’ 
119 


120 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


Poor France was at that very moment on its knees 
to this humble ‘‘Angelus’’ hoe farmer, begging him to 
coax more life-giving food from the soil. The soldiers 
of lovely France were bleeding to redeem this part of 
holy earth, this sacred soil, from whose mothering arms 
Frenchmen had sprung. In the very same hour we in 
America were also feeling the cramp of American food 
shortage and were experiencing city by city a new set 
of appreciations of the land, the soil, and the humble 
tiller of the soil. The Federal Government and all 
state governments were daily beseeching the farmers 
to increase their sowings and plantings. For a brief 
moment of life the countryman was our hero: farmer, 
planter, rancher, divided honors with the soldier, as 
possible saviors of the nation, and of democracy in 
the world. 

It will be forgiven if use is made of this world-wide 
spot-light upon the farmer in war-time to bring to 
national attention the relation of the American church 
to the American farmer, and to map out somewhat 
crudely the course of rural strategy for the church in 
dealing with this rural situation. 


RurRAL Ponuicy IN GOVERNMENT 


It will doubtless astound some churchmen to know the 
far-reaching character of the rural policy already en- 
gaging the best energies of the United States Govern- 
ment; to know the millions of dollars yearly invested in 
educational service in order to bring scientific method to 
bear upon the farmer’s occupation; to know the numer- 
ous staff of experts in every State seeking to reconstruct 


AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES 121 


the industry of farming so as to make of it an intellec- 
tual occupation. ‘‘Better farming, better business on 
the farm, better living on the farm,’’ adopted from that 
veteran ruralist, Sir Horace Plunkett, has become a 
government slogan since the days of Roosevelt. 


NEWER RURAL IDEALS IN EDUCATION 


The educational forees of our country, whether in 
universities, colleges, or normal schools, even in high 
schools, and in fact in the ordinary country school, are, 
it is no exaggeration to say, inspired with a vision of 
an educated country-side. New types of schools for the 
farmer’s children, both in the lower grades and in the 
higher, are the outcome. More country children finish- 
ing school, more country children going to high school 
and to college, is the result. The rural school-house 
under the inspiration of this new creed is becoming a 
forum for discussion and a meeting-place for the 
country neighborhood. It is a commonplace now in 
American education to display wonderful achievements 
made by some little country school. In the realm of 
finance, the bankers of America have their own special 
banker-farmer movement, a long-time policy of building 
up the industry of farming and not only keeping the 
fertility of the land from disappearing in the bushel 
measure but keeping the intellect of the land from drift- 
ing away to the city without rime or reason. 

What has the church done for the farmer? Surely 
in the face of this profound general recognition of the 
farmer class, who make up about thirty per cent of our 
American population, the church, speaking for religion, 


122 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


will be called upon some day soon to answer the query, 
‘‘What recognition have you given the farmer?”’ 

The church finally discovered for itself and acknowl- 
edged woman’s right and gave her a place in church 
administration. The church finally discovered for itself 
the psychology of the child; and has begun to concede 
to children a religious education based on child be- 
havior. Is it too much to expect that the great church 
body shall discover for itself the farmer, and begin to 
mobilize his special abilities and draft his powers into 
world-wide Christian service? 

Let us take a closer look at this man, who a few short 
years ago was in the lime-light, as the world waited 
before him on her knees for food. 


THe Farmer AND His Work 


Turn your eyes upon the farmer at his work. There 
he is, lifting the surface of the earth, turning it on its 
face, introducing a little seed, and waiting for the seed 
to follow its God-given law of growth and reproduce 
itself. There he is, tending his flocks and herds, his 
cotton-fields, his wheat-fields, his vineyards and. or- 
echards. He is God’s husbandman. He deals with life 
and helps God reproduce and multiply life on the earth. 
He lives his life in the midst of his work, the whole 
family on call day and night in the interest of growing 
plant or lost sheep or chilled, storm-menaced beast. 
Living in the open, working under the vault of heaven, 
he associates constantly and intimately with the great 
physical forces with which God works in His world. 

The farm family form a partnership among them- 


AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES ~ 123 


selves in a very real sense in this work of producing 
in bulk the seed and the animal. The child is brought 
up from infancy an apprentice to the occupation. 
Every girl is taught to work and do her bit for family 
maintenance. The fact that the family is so largely 
a real asset in farming has probably set the seal of 
country approval upon the home and family as an in- 
stitution, so that to-day, without doubt, the farm is the 
bulwark of the American home. In our largest cities 
the home as a home, the family as a family, are at the 
last ditch; and it appears that the humble farmer is 
holding the home line for religion and for the church. 


THE FARMER AND RELIGION 


If there are religious instincts in men and women, 
those instincts are to be found preéminently in the farm 
population. The mysterious life of the plant and 
animal seems to convey God’s presence to the farmer, as 
iron, wood, leather, cloth, and gold never convey God 
to the urban artificer who works his own will upon God’s 
materials. The farmer, God’s husbandman, in a 
peculiar sense seems to be God’s man, God’s steward, 
God’s tenant, God’s co-worker in life-saving and life- 
perpetuation. 

The Bible, in the literature both of the Old Testament 
and of the New, pays distinct tribute in its literary 
make-up to the relation between religion and agricul- 
ture. The Old Testament is a joint book of country 
life and religion. The Psalms breathe the free spirit 
of the winds. The hills, and streams, the pastures and 
meadows, the grass and grain, are all there. The cattle 


124 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


on a thousand hills symbolize to the agricultural mind 
God’s wealth. The parables of Jesus are in the lan- 
guage of field and farm work—the sheep and 
shepherd, the tares, the vine and its branches, the 
wicked husbandmen. The language of mystery, growth, 
decay, will doubtless always be agricultural. The 
ancient farmer and the modern farmer seem linked in- 
dissolubly to religion. When God wanted a leader for 
His people to free them from bondage, He chose a lad 
and brought him up finally on a farm’. Moses, slow of 
speech, but acquainted with God, led his people out of 
Egypt. When God wanted a king for His people, He 
chose a farmer boy, David, tending the flocks, rather 
than a goldsmith or an ironworker. When God wanted 
a prophet to shake the degenerate cities of the plain, 
He chose Amos, a farmer, blunt but real, just and bold. 


AGRICULTURE AND THE AMERICAN MINISTRY 


Not only has the most ancient farmer been timber for 
religious leadership in the distant past, but all through 
early American history a steady stream of farm youth, 
guided by New England and Southern pastors, went 
to the church colleges and found their way into the web 
and woof of church organization, as ministers, as 
church leaders among laymen, lawyers, captains of in- 
dustry, merchant princes. The exodus from the farms 
to the city in the days of the virile country church was 
one strong factor in the present urban church organiza- 
tion of America. The strong conviction of American 
Christianity came from the rugged individuality of 


AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES ~ 125 


farm-bred youth. The religious imagination of Amer- 
ica’s great preachers can be traced to the open sky and 
free air of the country-side. The urban church of 
America, in other words, has had its sources in the 
springs and streams of country life. 


THe FARMER’S CHURCHES TO-DAY 


The farmer has four types of churches to-day in 
America: the open country church, the hamlet church, 
the village church, the small-city church. The hamlet 
church contains seventy-five per cent of farm families. 
The village church contains fifty per cent of farmers. 
The small-city church, in cities ranging from three thou- 
sand to eight thousand, contains fifteen per cent of farm- 
ers. In churches of larger cities the farmer tends to 
disappear. 

The outstanding characteristics of the country, hamlet, 
and village churches to which the farmer belongs, con- 
sidering the United States as a whole, are as follows: 
(1) absentee preachers, that is, no resident pastors; 
(2) unorganized, ungraded churches, that is, occasional 
or periodic mass-meetings; (3) religiously divided and 
strongly competitive communities. It has been estimated 
that twenty millions of America’s thirty millions of 
land-workers are without resident pastors, without 
much of a church organization, and yet subject to in- 
tense sectarian consciousness. This is truly a situation 
of the most stupendous waste of spiritual power in all 
America’s wasteful history. The springs of religion 
are being squandered at the very source. The head- 


126 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


water hills of God, whence come the cool waters of re- 
ligion to the thirsty cities, are suffering fearful neglect 
if not exploitation. 


THe FARMER’S CHANGING PSYCHOLOGY 


The changing type of farm thinking presents an as- 
pect of our rural problem which gives an element of ur- 
gency and immediacy to all methods of rural relief. 
Boldly and bluntly stated, the old-time farmer of the 
‘‘Angelus’’ hoe-in-hand type is disappearing in Amer- 
ica. The machine farmer, the land engineer, is taking 
his place. A brain-using, scientific type is displacing 
the slow, plodding, muscular lifter of the soil. Govern- 
ment is placing a staff organization of thinkers at the 
disposal of these scattered land-dwellers, with a line 
organization of extension captains in every county. 
This striking change in the nature of farming is having 
a profound effect upon the social development and in- 
stitutional appreciations of the farm population. The 
new farmer is forming clubs and putting up community 
houses, getting new types of schools, getting into the 
swing of community modes of action, and is ready for a 
new type of church. The time is now ripe. The new 
farmer may now be interested in an efficient, organized 
church. If the church bodies delay the reconstruction 
of church organization, the farmer’s social energies 
may become employed in this wonderful community 
machinery at the expense of social religion. From the 
midst of the social awakening rings out a grave warning 
that rural church development is now at the crisis. 
Knergy of the human mind once set free will be used, 


AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES = 127 


and the new farmer is ready, but is the nation’s 
church leadership, also? 


RuRAL STRATEGY AND THE CHURCH 


The surpassing romance and adventure of the Amer- 
ican church in this generation has been its drive on pa- 
ganism across the seas. Christian strategy has turned 
on the world enterprise of ‘‘missions.’’ It has massed 
its consecrated intellectual energies; it has joined forces 
with Christendom; it has poured its treasure into the 
foreign crusade. The task looms larger and larger. 
The church must not, and cannot lose; and yet the need 
of resources in treasure, men and women, and perhaps, 
' greatest of all, in religious imagination, is staggering. 
America pauses now to inventory its home resources for 
carrying to a conclusion this majestic enterprise of God. 
Is there any suspicion that the American church 
has reached its climax? Does it question its finances, 
does it nervously look for prophets like those of 
old, men of stronger faith and more unremitting con- 
viction ? 

It is out of this pause and hesitation, out of the shock 
and uncertainty of war, out of the aftermath of hate, 
wretchedness, and suspicion, that the church in its be- 
wilderment may well turn its strategy to an untapped 
treasure-house of resources in the rural _ reserves. 
Twenty millions of the best blood and stamina in Amer- 
ica stand ready to be organized into efficient Christian 
communities to assist urban ingenuity in the world ad- 
venture for God. The country is the home of religious 
feeling. In it religious genius is native. To redeem 


128 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


country life, this is the rural strategy to save the 
church’s great.world adventure in missions. 

The rural church in America has been. ground to 
powder between the upper and lower millstones of two 
facts: first, the inescapable geographical necessity of a 
scattered farm residence under bondage to distance, 
from which urban population in clusters is free; and, 
secondly, an unregulated deadly competition of great 
national church bodies, within this scattered population, 
attempting to make three or four blades of ecclesiastical 
corn grow where there is sustenance enough to bring 
only one to maturity. The upper millstone of geography 
is irreducible, inevitable, and will remain. The lower 
millstone of denominational competition is controllable, 
and there is a ery to heaven for its removal. At any 
cost, at any price, this stone of offense must be removed. 

Would you test the rural church situation before the 
bar of human judgment, call for a Michelangelo or a 
Leonardo da Vinci to interpret the rural church of Amer- 
ica in a great piece of Christian art. 

Show him the rural sheep without shepherds. Show 
him the proud Christian sects dividing these shepherd- 
less sheep into pitiful huddled groups. Tell him to 
place Jesus in the midst and make the picture appeal to 
the heart of humanity; Jesus, who in Christian art 
holds the child in His arms, or is raising the fallen wo- 
man, or breaking bread to the hungry multitude, or giv- 
ing His lfe-blood for the world upon the cross. When 
your Christian artist shall once see the role, in the rural 
drama, of the great Christian sects, he will say, ‘‘They 


AGRICULTURE AND CHURCHES 129 


shall go into the picture, but robed in sackcloth and 
ashes.’’ 

Is there a plan for this policy of conservation of home 
resources in the development of the spiritual assets of 
the rural church? The first step is plain and inescap- 
able, a national staff of religious statesmen consecrated 
to the development of the rural church. 

This staff will grapple by God’s help with the eman- 
cipation of twenty millions of land-dwellers from the 
millstone of denominational exploitation. 

But this step requires a miracle first. It is the par- 
alytiec over again. He cannot take the first step. Why? 
Because there has not arisen yet a man of faith to bid 
the paralytic walk. Denominations are doing wonder- 
ful things as denominations, each for itself—national 
country-life leaders, country-life teachers in colleges, 
demonstration churches, higher salaries for rural pas- 
tors, rural-life conferences and summer schools, and 
many other things, among which should be mentioned the 
delightfully friendly relation of these various country- 
life men and committees and conferences of the different 
religious bodies. This denominational interest in the 
rural church problem is hopeful. This movement may 
bring forth the man of faith who ean bid the paralytic 
stand and walk. However, there is a bare possibility 
that competitive sectarianism, with more weapons, may 
wage war more jealously and perhaps more keenly, and 
the farmers’ churches may still remain uninfluential. 
The cordial and friendly personal relationships of the 
different denominational country-life leaders must not 


130 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


be taken for the denominational entente cordiale which 
is to consolidate the rural church groups into great rural 
churches, and give to every farm family an organized 
church. This will require that the spirit of Christ shall 
melt down the haughty, unbending individualisms of 
the proud sects into a single, common aim in country 
life. 

Consolidation of country school districts and schools 
for modernized education of farm children; consolidation 
of rural trade-agencies into complete terminal towns for 
a modernized rural standard of living; consolidation of 
church groups for a powerful rural religion. Can these 
things be? It is so hard to give up the present posses- 
sion on bare promise of a greater possession. The little 
eountry school still sticks but is slipping. The little 
country village sticks and will die sticking. The little 
eountry church, will it also hang on to its own life and 
lose it, or will it merge its life, and gain it back a 
thousandfold ? 


CHAPTER X 


CAN THE FARM FAMILY AFFORD 
MODERN INSTITUTIONS ? 


aN , YE cannot afford it, we simply cannot afford 
it,’’ has been one of the most common plaints 
in the human family. 

‘Though we cannot afford it, we must have it, be- 
cause we cannot afford to be without it,’’ is a very fre- 
quent modern variation of the theme. 

Between the simple idea of not affording it and the 
complex idea of not affording to be without it les a 
long range of various ideals of living. There lies also 
a variety of ideas of financing. 

The father says, ‘‘We cannot afford to drain that ten- 
acre lot.’’ The son says: ‘‘We cannot afford not to 
drain it. We must drain it.’’ The father says, ‘‘We 
have no money to spend in draining.’’ The son replies, 
‘We will borrow the money, and let the drains pay for 
themselves.’’ The father may be right and the son 
wrong. On the other hand, the son may be right and the 
father wrong. It all depends. 

If affording is an elusive thing in families when it 
comes to the matter of domestic budgets, much more is 
it elusive and almost an underground thing in popu- 
lation groups and classes, when it comes to budgets for 

131 


132 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


institutions. Recognizing the difficulty of giving an 
answer to the question whether the farm family can af- 
ford modern institutions as well as the city, it does 
seem justifiable to open up discussion and bring to light 
some of the factors now hidden in the situation. 

Let us try to simplify our subject as much as possible 
by naming four modern institutions which will stand 
for us in place of modern institutions in the abstract. 
Let us limit our discussion, therefore, in the main to 
public libraries, general hospitals, recreation centers, 
and high schools. These are well accredited in the pub- 
lie mind of the city population as worthy of sup- 
port whether private and philanthropic or of a municipal 
budgetary character. Andrew Carnegie’s library bene- 
factions have done much to place a public library in 
towns and cities and to win over annual municipal ap- 
propriations for maintenance. Religious bodies have 
popularized general hospitals as public necessities. 
Physicians and surgeons have given their moral support, 
and finally municipalities have begun to contribute to 
these institutions. Recreation centers, playgrounds, 
salaried trained leadership, have come slowly, through 
much struggle, to find a place in municipal budgets. 
High schools are part and parcel of every city budget. 
Let us narrow our present discussion down to whether 
the farm family can afford these modern institutions, 
which cities have come in very recent years to recognize 
as necessary and have felt that they could afford. 

A second preliminary question is that of a criterion 
or test of affording. Here is the difficult part of the 
task. Here is where it is impossible to get unanimous 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 133 


eonsent. Proof is lacking along any line. Nobody 
knows the underlying facts. Cities have the institu- 
tions. Shall we assume that they can afford them? Let 
us SO assume, and pay no attention to the possibility that 
even cities are going beyond their means in maintenance 
of these four public enterprises. 

In the absence of a recognized criterion of the institu- 
tions a population group ean or cannot afford, we shall 
summon for our consideration such comparisons of prop- 
erty, income, taxes, bonded debt, tax-levying groupings, 
and numbers of producing people as are possible, between 
the city group and farm group, in the expectation that 
sources of ability to afford may emerge and that in- 
ability to afford may be better located. The discussion 
plainly involves economics. It also involves political 
science. But it no less involves the broad features of 
social science. 

One question involving a eriterion of affording will be 
a cause of some dispute. It is this: Shall the ‘‘prop- 
erty’’ in the comparison between farm and city be the 
net worth of the total number of individuals making up 
the farm population? Or shall ‘‘property’’ be the 
value of land, buildings, live stock, crops in hand, etce., 
directly connected with agriculture, irrespective of the 
question of who holds the title? Put the matter thus: 
Which is the true criterion of a population’s affording 
public institutions: net worth of individuals, or property 
involved in the business? We cannot discuss this prob- 
lem at length. It would take us too far afield. One con- 
sideration only will be made. If the criterion were net 
worth of individuals, then in cities some millions of in- 


134 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


dividuals with little or no net worth would be virtually 
paupers, utilizing hospitals, libraries, schools, play- 
grounds, by sufferance. The theory of taxation for pub- 
lic institutions is involved at this point. 


FarM PopuLATION versus Crry POPULATION 


In 1920, the U. S. Census gave the farm population 
as 31,614,269. During the past three years it is a mat- 
ter of common knowledge that a strong current of mi- 
gration has set in from farm to city. A government 
estimate for the year 1921 based on returns from ten 
thousand farms indicated a net loss in that year of 
nearly half a million persons. It is quite probable that 
the farm population is now around thirty millions. 

Here are, in round numbers, six million families on six 
million farms. It is, of course, absurd to ask whether 
each family can separately afford modern institutions. 
It is probably almost as absurd to ask whether each 
township of farmers, in States like Wisconsin where the 
township is the farmer’s local municipality, can afford 
a modern library, hospital, recreation center, and high 
school. But the mention for a moment of these absurdi- 
ties sobers us and shows us that bound up in our theme 
is the pertinent question of what group of farmers is 
under consideration for a unit of library, a unit of hos- 
pital, a unit of recreation center, a unit of high school. 
This inquiry discloses to us how complicated a problem 
is before us, for it may well turn out that neither any 
farm family can afford these institutions, nor any exist- 
ing governmental group; while at the same time the in- 
dividual resources of the thirty millions of farmers 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS ~ 135 


would be sufficient to finance all these modern institu- 
tions, if only the thirty millions could be grouped into 
efficient groups. Let us watch this aspect of our prob- 
lem aS we go on. 

In order to make the comparison between the city 
population and the farm population more definite and. 
graphic, let us pick out a particular city population of 
about the same number. The population of cities rang- 
ing from twenty-five hundred to one hundred thousand 
inhabitants has approximately thirty millions of people. 
Suppose we use this set of cities and this population in 
our comparative thinking, where the two sets of popula- 
tion are considered. These are the smaller and medium- 
sized cities. In fact, in common parlance, the list in- 
cludes the larger towns and villages. They are all es- 
sentially alike in this respect; namely, they are compact 
legal groups, chartered by legislative enactment, and 
given powers of local government, and especially of tax- 
ation, and borrowing and bonding. We have picked 
this set of smaller cities, towns, and villages for compari- 
son because, in the first place, the farm population is 
seattered around and among these smaller cities, 
towns, and villages, and bears a very important relation 
to these trade centers as retail consumers of their trade 
goods and services. In the second place, virtually every 
one of these incorporated places has a high school and 
public library; a large percentage of them have recrea- 
tion facilities; and fifty per cent of them have general 
hospitals. In the third place the cities having a con- 
centration of great nationally produced wealth are 
left out. 


136 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


If one will try to visualize, not merely on the United 
States map but over the landscape of the States, these 
two population groups, the following discussion will 
prove more fertile. 


VALUE OF FARM AND City PROPERTY 


The United States Census of Agriculture for 1920 
gives the total value of farm property (by whomsoever 
owned), including land, buildings, implements and ma- 
chinery, and live stock, as seventy-eight billion dollars 
in round numbers, no account being taken of crops on 
hand, cash on hand, or other forms of property. This 
makes a per capita value of $2464 for every man, woman, 
and child of the farm population of 1920. For land and 
buildings alone the per capita value was $2100; for land 
alone, $1734. The range and variety of values can be 
seen by the difference in the per capita (farm popula- 
tion) total value of all farm property of the following 
States: Alabama, $600; Georgia, $805; Texas, $1909; 
New York, $2385; Indiana, $3354; Colorado, $4047; 
Towa, $8612. 

Two carefully studied estimates of the material wealth, 
of the United States are available: one by W. R. Ingalls, 
in ‘‘ Wealth and Income of the American People,’’ plac- 
ing the figure for December 31, 1920, at $290,909,285,628, 
or close to $2739 per capita; the other by W. I. King, in 
‘“‘The Net Volume of Saving in the United States,”’ 
for January 1, 1919, $294,145,000,000, or approximately 
$2820 per capita. 

Dr. L. C. Gray, of the Bureau of Agricultural Eco- 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 137 


nomics, United States Department of Agriculture, in a 
detailed study of the ‘‘Accumulation of Wealth by 
Farmers,’’ estimated the net worth of the total farm 
population on January 1, 1920, as $62,522,729,703, or 
close to $1978 per capita of farm population. If we 
subtract Dr. Gray’s net worth of all farm classes from 
the Ingalls figure, the per capita net worth of the popu- 
lation other than farmers stands at $3060; if from Dr. 
King’s figure, $3175. These three calculations are not 
precisely comparable because of a slight difference in 
point of time. It would appear, however, that the non- 
farming class as a whole has a net worth per capita 
fifty per cent higher than the farming class as a whole. 

The United States Census ‘‘Financial Statistics for 
Cities’’ for 1921 gives us the estimated true valuation 
of all real and personal property subject to the general 
tax in all cities of the United States ranging from a 
population of thirty thousand upward. Unfortunately 
for our special purpose here, the figures are not given for » 
the cities ranging from twenty-five hundred persons up 
to thirty thousand. What we should like for compari- 
son is the total value of all property in the cities from 
twenty-five hundred up to one hundred thousand persons. 
But perhaps we are not badly in the dark, for we have 
enough information to get our general bearings. Let 
us see. Here are the figures for the upper portion of 
the cities in our thirty-million city group; viz., for the 
105 cities in the group having from thirty thousand to 
fifty thousand population the per capita true value of 
all real estate and personal property subject to the 


138 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


general tax for city purposes was, in 1921, $1338.97. 
For the seventy-six cities having a population from 
fifty thousand to one hundred thousand the per capita 
true value of all such property in 1921 was $1271.15. 
Lacking information from the same source for the cities 
from twenty-five hundred up to thirty thousand, we are 
compelled to look elsewhere. 

The tax department of the Chicago and North 
Western Railway Company furnishes us the estimated 
full value of real estate and the 1921 assessed full value 
of general personal property in thirty-five Iowa cities, 
each having from 2125 to 5000 population (only eight 
of these cities have less than 2500 population). The 
per capita true total value of the property was $1990, 
distributed as follows: real estate, $1383; tangible 
personal, $170; money and credits, $487. The company 
furnishes us also the similar facts for the fourteen 
Iowa cities ranging from five thousand up to one 
hundred and thirty-five thousand. (Only one city, Des 
Moines, has over one hundred thousand population.) 
The per capita total value of the property, similarly 
based, was, for 1922, $2035, distributed as follows: 
real estate, $1592; tangible personal, $211; money and 
credits, $232. The range of variation in the two lists 
of values was very narrow. 

To sum up this particular comparison of city and 
farm property values, the best we can do is to register 
the per capita city property (limited to such property 
as is subject to the general property tax) as lying be- 
tween $1300 and $2000; while the per capita farm 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 139 


property (not limited by any taxing features or owner- 
ship title) is $2100 for real estate alone, and $2464 
per capita when machinery and live stock are added, 
whereas the per capita net worth of the farm population 
stands around $1978, as against the per capita net 
worth of the non-farming population, $3060. 


Farm INcOME AND City INCOME COMPARED 


The national Bureau of Economic Research in a docu- 
ment entitled, ‘‘Distribution of Income by States in 
1919,’’ gives us the only available means of comparing 
farm income with city income for the United States, 
State by State, in the year 1919, when, it will be recalled, 
farm income reached a high peak, from which it has 
decidedly dropped in later years. The comparison, as 
would be expected, is not wholly satisfactory. But, 
being the best at hand, it must serve. 

The bureau gives in its final tables the total income 
of the nation for the year 1919 as $66,252,601,000; total 
income for farm laborers, $2,345,964,000, and for 
farmers, $10,851,096,000. The sum of the incomes of 
farm laborers and farmers is $13,197,060,000. And the 
total national income minus the income of the farm 
laborers and farmers is $53,055,541,000. These basic 
figures, when combined with the basic figures of total 
population and farm population, result in a per capita 
farm population income of $417 and in a per capita in- 
come for the rest of the population of $716. Let us 
introduce a short table at this point which will earry 
some of the per capita results of this authority as ap- 


140 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


plied to various States in widely separated parts of the 
United States. 


Farm Income AND Crry INCOME FoR THE YEAR 1919 


States Farm income City mcome 
. §469 King : 
United States i ietaies M417 Knanth 716 
Nebraasittig oy cow hvac ee 700 700 
TAWA aoe a ate aoe 724 691 
Aa ra ea ees se 244 478 
Wew s York vnr.ce ne cate 550 900 
Tavares ire Shor iis area eee 463 634 
COREE ONIN eh eae has ae 1042 780 
TUTE ie yc. var autes Sha ete 643 790 
ECAR ea lg cae Roe a wr 468 605 
LIBS OMT cs, beteeele is ete 378 570 
MOUIION Greta cata ia, eiam 370 618 


It will be noticed that the per capita income of the 
farm population in California, Iowa, and Nebraska is 
either equal to, or in excess of, the city income in the 
same States respectively. 

One other thing should be noted at this point: Ala- 
bama cities with a per capita income of $478, Missouri 
cities with $570, both approaching the average farm in- 
come of $417 or $469, were in 1919, and are now, main- 
taining their quota of modern institutions. For in- 
stance, Alabama: 66 hospitals, with 2703 beds; 29 
libraries; 22 recreation centers; 181 high schools. Mis- 
sourl: 44 hospitals, 1678 beds; 57 libraries; 27 recrea- 
tion centers; 549 high schools. 


Farm TAXES COMPARED WITH Crry TAXES 


In the year 1921, the cities from thirty thousand to 
one hundred thousand in population spent forty-nine 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 141 


per cent of their total city budget on schools, libraries, 
recreation, and health. The percentage is distributed 
as follows: 





Schools 42.45 
Libraries 1.35 
Health 20 
Recreation 2.85 

49.00 


We do not have the high-school budget separately. 
But practically every city has the four items in its 
budget. 

It has not been possible to collect the data for farm 
taxes in like manner, distributed among these four 
items. Presumably, however, no percentage will appear 
for libraries or recreation, and little for health (nothing 
for general hospitals, hospitals in counties being for the 
poor and insane). 

Note in passing should be made of the fact that the 
farmer in the prices for the goods which he purchases 
of the city business man—harness, wagons, plows, fer- 
tilizer, clothes, furniture, groceries, plumbing, and the 
like—pays as a consumer his share of the overhead ex- 
pense of the business, in which item is the forty-nine 
per cent of the total municipal taxes going for schools, 
health, recreation, and libraries. There may be a ques- 
tion whether the tax on the city man’s entire business 
enterprise can be shifted to the ultimate consumer of 
his business product. The tax on the land part of the 


142 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


business, for example, may, generally speaking, be con- 
ceded as not capable of being shifted; but without 
question some part of the tax is shifted, and the farmer 
is therefore, as a matter of fact, helping to pay the 
schooling of the city boys and girls in high schools, and 
to pay for hospitals for the city’s sick and for recreation 
facilities and library facilities for the city. This fact 
certainly presents a strange anomaly, viz., that the 
farmer can afford to help sustain city high schools, hos- 
pitals, libraries, and recreation places but possibly may 
not afford to have these institutions himself. 

In facing this strange situation, the mind of the 
serious student goes over at once to the farmer’s business 
enterprise to see what similar overhead expense is 
shifted to the city consumer of wheat, milk, meat, cotton, 
and potatoes. Here he is met with the fact that up- 
ward of three quarters of the farmer’s property sub- 
ject to general tax is land, and the tax cannot be shifted. 
On the balance, his school tax, broadly speaking, carries 
no high-school tax and a smaller per capita grade-school 
tax than in the city. There is no library tax, a neg- 
ligible health tax, no recreation tax. In his local taxes, 
therefore, the farmer seems unable to get from the city 
consumer of his goods a compensation in kind to offset 
his own contribution to the upkeep of the city man’s 
institutions. 

But the student now insists that the farmer must 
somewhere get back from the city what he pays to 
the city. He therefore begins to scrutinize the 
state and federal taxes in an effort to discover such an 
offset. 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 143 


In vain, however, does the student search in state 
and federal taxes for an offset in kind; that is, toward 
farmer high schools (with some exception, to be sure, 
in certain regions), libraries, recreation centers, and 
hospitals. Whatever legacy is left to the country-side 
by cities year by year through state and federal taxation 
—whether in highways, graded schools, universities, ex- 
tension information on soils and agriculture—the four 
items in question are on the whole left out. 


Farm Bonvep Dest AND City Bonpep DEsr CoMPARED 


How much bonded debt can a population group con- 
stantly hold up? This question is important, for by the 
bonded debt route cities have been able to have institu- 
tions before they cared to pay cash for them; that is, 
speaking in ordinary terms, before they could afford 
them. Or to put it a little differently, the discovery of 
the device of a bonded debt has enabled the city to af- 
ford an institution which possibly it could not other- 
wise have had. Bonding is now in question as a possible 
device for our farm population. How much affording 
power have they by this method? 

We do not know. No one has dogged the thing down. 
The presumption is strong that farmers have not used 
the bonding method so variously as cities, nor so vigor- 
ously as cities. This presumption needs thorough 
verification. 

We do have figures, however, on cities. According 
to the census report on cities the group of cities from 
fifty thousand population to one hundred thousand 
carries over its head, lke an umbrella, an average of 


144 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS ~ 


three million dollars per city. The group from thirty 
thousand to fifty thousand carries per city one and one 
half million dollars. New York City carries one bil- 
lion seven hundred million dollars, about $340 per 
eapita. This bonded debt provides high schools, hos- 
pitals, libraries, recreation centers. It seems a pity to 
leave this interesting comparison at so inconclusive a 
point. 


FARM PoPpuLATION UNIT AND Crty Unit CompaArro 


Has the farm family an economical governmental pop- 
ulation unit for affording the local modern institutions 
which the city affords? The underlying principle at 
this point is what is known familiarly in indusiry as 
volume of business. If the farm population of thirty 
millions is put up in packages of too small a volume to 
afford an institution, then they are in almost as bad 
a situation as if each farm family were ‘‘going it alone’’ 
on institutions and the farmers had no local groups at 
all—as if they had, in fact, only the State and the 
nation. What is the local farm population package? 
A township containing the standard thirty-six square 
miles of area, or something a little more or less, is the 
farmers’ ordinary local unit. It has a population 
averaging between five hundred and six hundred farm 
persons. In the East South Central region, containing 
Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, the unit 
would be 1080 persons, if such a unit were in existence. 
In the Middle West, the unit is about eight hundred 
persons. The township, as a whole, or a local unit 
like a township, has a volume of persons somewhat 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 145 


like a village of from five hundred to one thousand 
persons. 

This unit is really too small to support with a high 
degree of economy and effectiveness modern institutions 
such as cities possess. 

The next farm unit for consideration is the county. 
There are about three thousand counties in the United 
States, with an average farm population of ten thousand 
persons. Here is a unit of a far different kind from the 
township; different because it contains usually several 
distinct community groups instead of one. The county 
is in no sense comparable with a village, town, or city of 
any size. The county as a collection of social groups 
would be comparable to a so-called ‘‘greater’’ city, 
which in fact is a rather compact aggregation of several 
smaller suburban city municipalities, satellites to a 
larger central city. A ‘‘Greater Boston’’ has a certain 
unity; but with the institutions we are speaking about, 
each satellite unit provides for its own municipality. 

Observing this characteristic of the county, that it is 
different from a local municipality in structure, we 
shall, however, consider whether it provides the requisite 
volume of farm persons to float the institutions in 
question. 

We are not in doubt at this point, because we have 
examples enough in various States to point the way. 
County administration of high schools, for example, in 
a State like Utah, will provide for a county several high 
schools situated conveniently for the entire population. 
The experience of Utah shows that the county does fur- 
nish the necessary volume of farm persons, and, more- 


146 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


over, that county administrators have the point of view 
of the whole population sufficiently to establish as many 
high schools as the need warrants. 

In like manner several States have under new legis- 
lative enactments established county hospitals and 
county libraries, showing that the belief exists that the 
county can carry these institutions. It is noteworthy 
that West Virginia counties contemplate the establish- 
ment of county camp grounds for their farm boys’ and 
girls’ clubs as an adjunct to the state camp. This 
would indicate that the county unit is adequate for the 
maintenance of certain types of recreation places for 
farm people. 

A careful survey of county legislation in the United 
States during the past ten years will demonstrate that 
at least a certain percentage of counties have the neces- 
sary volume of farm persons to maintain modern in- 
stitutions. The difficult part of the problem in such 
counties is to locate the institutions so as to make them 
available to all parts of the county. 


NUMBERS OF PRODUCING PEOPLE IN FARM AND CrtTy 
GROUPS COMPARED 


There is another interesting criterion of affording in. 
stitutions, viz., the number of producing persons in any 
unit of the farm population. The question is something 
lke this: has a unit of farm population of ten thousand 
persons a sufficient number of active producing persons 
to carry modern institutions for its whole unit? Put 
a little differently, the question may be stated thus: 
does a unit of ten thousand farm people have such a 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 147 


large number of non-pivducing’ people to take care of 
and provide with the basic necessities of life that it can- 
not afford the institutions that carry into the home the 
enrichment of higher living and some of the comforts of 
knowledge and health? Put it more definitely: does the 
farm population carry the load of a large number of 
children under ten years of age; does it carry a large 
number of aged people; do these groups of non-producers 
handicap the population, in comparison with the city 
group ? 

The 1920 census shows that in cities of twenty-five 
hundred and upward 19 per cent of the population are 
under ten years of age. In the total farm population of 
the country 25.7 per cent are under ten years of age. 
Put into concrete form, in a unit of 10,000 city people, 
1900 young children would be non-producers; in 10,000 
farm people, 2570 would be non-producing children. 
The farm unit would be carrying a handicap of 670 
children, and the city would, theoretically, have 670 more 
producers. In the thirty-million city group there are 
two million fewer children under ten years of age than 
in the thirty millions of farm people. 

It would be interesting to know how the farm and 
city groups compare in the matter of other groups of 
non-producers, such as those incapacitated through age, 
invalidism, or riches. The data, however, as yet are 
lacking. But the extra burden of two million children 
to rear and educate, with two million fewer producers 
to do it, raises a serious question on the score of how to 
do it. It is evident that the farm population is pouring 
this continuous surplus of adolescents, ready reared 


148 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


and ready educated by the farm people, into the city 
groups as producers of city wealth. The question again 
comes back: what compensation has the farm population 
for its contribution of producers to city production, 
and for the ultimate wealth of this contribution? No 
answer is ready, because nobody has dug the matter out. 
We must rest our comments at this point, hoping later 
for more information. 

In ciosing the presentation it must be acknowledged 
that our results are wholly inconclusive. We simply 
bring up a new problem involving economies, political 
science, and social science. Even presumptions are 
hazardous at this stage of the inquiry. The institutions 
in question—high school, modern public library, modern 
hospital, modern recreation center—are generally ac- 
cepted adjuncts of modern city life, and are looked upon 
as bringing into home life enrichment and such melio- 
rating influences as tend to stabilize, protect, and per- 
petuate the family. It is probably justifiable to pre- 
sume that these enrichments would do for the farm 
home what they do for the city home. 

Moreover, we do know that a small percentage of the 
farm population which resides within the incorporated 
limits of cities is already enjoying all these facilities. 
We furthermore know that another very small per- 
centage of farm families, through the medium of various 
legislative devices in counties and in so-called con- 
solidated school districts, are likewise enjoying some of 
these institutions. The consolidated school movement 
probably points the way like a sign-board to the wider 
utilization of these modern facilities. At heart this 


MODERN INSTITUTIONS 149 


school movement was simply one of creating a unit of 
population for school purposes large enough to insure a 
modern school. Why not, therefore, if other conditions 
of affording permit, create enlarged library districts, 
hospital districts, recreation districts. 

The city of twenty-five thousand persons is fortunate 
in having a population group large enough to support 
within itself each of the four institutions. It may very 
well turn out that the farm population will find it to 
their advantage to make up some of these new districts 
in municipal alliance with towns and cities of ten thou- 
sand population and under, towns and cities which 
have in themselves hardly a sufficient volume of persons 
to maintain a hospital. Perhaps, on the other hand, the 
county can go forward toward all of these institutions. 

This crude discussion will perform its part if it opens 
the way to serious research along the line of these 
various eriteria of affording, so that one year hence or 
ten years hence a demonstration can be made one way or 
the other. America should not let this question sink 
into oblivion. Americans should know whether farm 
people can afford homes enriched by large, vital, col- 
lectively maintained modern institutions. If it turns 
out that farmers cannot afford hospitals and libraries as 
matters stand, then America should know why not, and 
what the remedy is. If it turns out statistically that 
farmers can afford such up-to-date facilities, America 
should know why the farm people do not have them. 
Nothing short of this direct inquiry will suffice. Even 
if it should take a commission of financial experts to 
get at the facts, it would be fruitful and profitable. 


CHAPTER XI 


REPLANNING THE CITY AS A PLACE NOT TO 
LIVE IN 


HAT, no longer live in cities? Only work 

\ \ in cities? De-home, de-residence, and de- 

house every city? Plan all the cities over 

again into purely commercial areas, for factories, shops, 

mills, offices, stores? Lock the city up at night and go 

home somewhere else to sleep? Yes, all of that, and 
—well, just that. 

The fact is that the city, modern or ancient, is not a 
fit place to live in and make a home in and bring up 
children in. It is not a good place to tee off from in the 
morning. It is no place to hole into at the end of the 
day. The city of moderns is a vast workshop at best. 
Business is in the driver’s seat and rides roughshod over 
life. Let us go the limit of concession and surrender the 
whole city to business and, as for ourselves, move out 
into God’s country and live while we live with trees at 
our door, with air to breathe, with God’s sunlight pour- 
ing in, with space to move about in and quiet to cover us. 

But why eall the situation rural? Where is the rural 
part of the problem? 

Not to draw the matter out at length, this is it: to put 
all the city people into a residence zone, out of the pre- 

150 


REPLANNING THE CITY 151 


eincts of the business city, is, so far at least, to ruralize 
the homes of city people. It is to give every city family 
a sunshine home, a home which possesses many of the 
advantages of the farm home. To suggest the desir- 
ability of such a thing, and to show, in the most general 
sort of way even, how it could be done, is to grapple with 
a great rural problem, even though also an urban 
problem. 

To decentralize the homes of city people will take up 
much agricultural land. Too much, it will be said by 
some persons. This is another rural aspect of the situ- 
ation. To bring all the city families into the country 
and let them share in country life will go far, it may be 
expected, toward mending the break between farm peo- 
ple and city people. At any rate, let us think together 
on this great proposal to ruralize all city living. 


Tue PRESSURE OF BusINESS UPON Home Lire 


First let us look squarely at the indictment that bus- 
iness is in the driver’s seat and rides roughshod over 
life in the American city. Is it true? If it is exag- 
gverated, is there truth enough in it to make one pause? 

Do you remember when the city of twenty thousand 
began to leap toward a city of fifty thousand people? 
You were surprised one morning to see the breaking of 
ground for a business building among the very best 
residences near the heart of the city. Do you recall 
thereafter the rather rapid invasion of that street of 
homes by other new business buildings and blocks? Do 
you recall how some homes stayed and stuck, cramped 
and squeezed between stores? How some dvwelling- 


152 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


houses were remodeled slightly and turned into head- 
quarters for undertakers or into offices for physi- 
cians? How the more prosperous people finally moved 
out of the squeezed houses, and how their places were 
taken by less fortunate people? As you recall it, so 
everybody all over America recalls it. Growing busi- 
ness in the minor cities has driven out the very ‘‘best 
families,’’? and then begun a squeeze upon the poorer 
families that remained. 

Do you wish to see a similar phenomenon in operation 
in New York City to-day? Go to West Fifty-seventh 
Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Do you re- 
member easily within a generation when there were only 
brownstone residences on either side of this block? The 
Vanderbilt home on the north corner of Fifty-seventh 
Street was only one of several well known New York 
homes on either side of the street. Go look to-day. The 
millionaires have moved out. The Vanderbilt mansion 
is being reconstructed. Across the street is a sky- 
scraper. Exclusive business buildings with dashing 
fronts have built in, on either side, occupying already 
half the ground space. The dwellings left standing are 
in the sad process of being squeezed out. In another 
decade business will be sole ruler in that part of Fifty- 
seventh Street. 

Business is no respecter of persons in the matter of 
commercial invasion. As the wealthy home must move 
out of the way, so the poor must move or be squeezed; 
and it is the squeezed portion of the population and the 
squeezing phenomenon that arrests our attention and 
causes our outburst, protest, and demand to zone the 


REPLANNING THE CITY 153 


city against dwelling. The tragedy of the ease is not 
in being driven out by business but in remaining and 
having the life of the home squeezed out by business. 

Lest you may not recognize fully all the varieties of 
this squeeze, please look a little further. When busi- 
ness captures the ground floor away from the home, it 
may invite the dweller up-stairs, and so the home re- 
mains in the locality but is forced upward against the 
sky. Business rules below and on the street and ex- 
ploits the home in order to meet some of its expenses. 
This type of exploitation has never been thoroughly 
looked into, studied, analyzed, brooded over. The legit- 
imacy of a store on the ground floor and a family apart- 
ment over the store, for example, has never been ques- 
tioned seriously. May it not be an unfair business prac- 
tice, unfair to other business competitors? Is it an eth- 
ical building practice? What would far-seeing archi- 
tects say? What will the coming building code say? Is 
there not a social derangement, almost amounting to a 
social disease, induced in the family by a store business 
which makes a by-product of housing a family? 

If you were to go from city to city and photograph all 
the surroundings of homes caught in the claws of the city 
squeeze, you would be astounded at how the human fam- 
ily has been pressed out of semblance to a human home 
by the business squeeze. Squeezed between buildings, 
squeezed below ground, squeezed skyward, squeezed to 
the alley, squeezed against the street! And every 
squeeze a suffocation of the home. 

It is remarkable how humans cling to the shreds of 
old dwelling localities. When business can get along on 


154 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


its own resources without the bother of home dwellers, 
it cleans everything and everybody out, root and branch, 
and converts the space into business. Then a new tene- 
ment quarter may arise around the corner overnight, as 
it were. And homes go skyward and impinge upon one 
another. Thereupon this tenement district or block 
enters upon the pathos of a mammoth squeeze between 
business districts or business blocks on all sides. Whole- 
sale suffocation begins. What though a playground is 
mercifully injected like oxygen into the dying patient? 
What though a small park be created two corners down? 
Business is oblivious. Its own atmosphere blows over 
the area. 

What does the squeeze mean to the American city 
homes that cannot or will not get out of business 
precincts? You do not wish to hear about it any more? 
You have seen it, and heard it preached about, and given 
money for its amelioration, until you are sick and tired? 
But wait, have you ever heard it suggested that the 
homes of all be taken out of the midst of business, as a 
police measure? Then you will listen a little longer, 
and perhaps you will gain hope for the remedy by see- 
ing just what the damage is to the home in its present 
quarters. 

The squeeze, first of all, means a terrific exaggeration 
of all the deprivations that residence in any locality of 
the city suffers even before the beginning of the bold en- 
croachment of business: small space, little air, little light 
—three basic physical and psychological factors. These 
are bad enough, and their evil has perhaps been venti- 
lated sufficiently during the past years. 


REPLANNING THE CITY 155 


What has not received enough:attention is the pres- 
sure and impact of the voleanic might of business itself, 
in all its variety, upon the delicately sensitive home 
structure. The gross assumption, on the part of busi- 
ness, of the home’s inferiority and subordination to busi- 
ness stands there. The business leviathan overawes the 
finest product of life, whether that home be poor or rich. 
Business is the Philistine, and the squeeze is Philistinism 
exerted upon the home; the home submits, and submis- 
sion is the frustration of home life. 

This assumption of business is bad Americanism. 
Business, which exists for the American home, does 
America an incomparable injustice in overawing the 
home. But the recognition by the home of the overlord- 
ship of business is also bad Americanism. 

Perhaps the fault, if fault there is, is on both sides. 
The home should never be there to be squeezed. The 
place belongs to business. On the other hand, business 
should not wheedle the home to stay in the squeeze. At 
any rate, the remedy is retirement of the home from the 
operating ground of business. 


THE PERILS OF BUSINESS STREETS 


Where business reigns, the streets are virtually com- 
mandeered for business purposes. Business, in many 
respects, it seems, is a satisfaction of the masculine prim- 
itive instincts, man’s substitute for war. The rough- 
shod tactics of militarism, which ruthlessly breaks homes, 
is matched by the arrogance of business. ‘‘ Business is 
business’’ has much the same apologetic flavor as ‘‘ War 
is hell.’’ At its very worst, so far as the human home is 


156 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


concerned, business appears to be ‘‘hell’’ just as is war 
at its best. Nowhere in modern life does the worst side 
of business appear so openly as in the streets of the city. 
Look at the picture and see it as it is. 

The swirl of traffic down the street of the city is 
threatening like an oncoming storm, a tornado—its 
narrow path a dead-line, or a terror at least. The traf- 
fic’s daily score of mutilation and death comes to be ac- 
cepted by the public and by the home as the inevitable 
toll of business, just as death and mutilation on the field 
of battle are the toll of war. And yet the homes that 
are squeezed off the ground by business and into the air 
send their children—for so they must—down to the 
ground to stretch their limbs, close to the track of the 
tornado. And just as surely as business is business, so 
surely will ‘‘boys be boys’’; and the play spirit of the 
home meets its sorrows. 

The business streets have come to be as dangerous to 
life and limb as the railway yards or the trackage in the 
yard of a steel mill, around which a wall is reared. It 
is aS dangerous to cross such streets as to cross grade- 
crossings of railways, which are made relatively safe by 
watchmen and automatic bars and clanging bells. But 
custom is forming a crust over our sensibilities. The 
public is taking this death-toll as in the Middle Ages it 
took famine, cholera, and the plague, with frozen terror 
but with submission and resignation. And no succor is 
in sight. 

The fact may just as well be faced now as a genera- 
tion from now that for an American home there is no 
living with city business traffic. Added to the iron 


REPLANNING THE CITY 157 


squeeze of the business buildings is this squeeze of busi- 
ness traffic at the threshold of the home, at the rear, and 
from the alley. Butis there a way out? The answer is, 
yes. 

To de-house and de-home the business sections of all 
our cities will release needed space both to business and 
to traffic. It does not require a fertile mind to see what 
a boon it would be to traffic to take all the dwellings, 
apartments, sleeping-quarters, out of congested business 
areas. It certainly requires little imagination to see 
what it would mean to the home to take the peril of the 
business street from the heart of the household. 


THE SUBURBAN MovEMENT 


Freedom from the squeeze of business and from the 
consequent perils and discomforts of congested city dis- 
tricts is by no means a new story. The pleasures of 
space for home-building are as old as cities themselves. 
The wealthy have had their country homes time out of 
mind. In America the country estate and country 
house have figured since colonial days. 

But not until electric lines and automotive transport 
made it possible have the middle-class American families 
been, able to have the shelter of a country home. In the 
last two decades, however, the ordinary salaried married 
city worker, if he so desires, has been enabled and per- 
suaded to live in the suburbs. And so one of the social 
phenomena of our time, the suburban movement so 
called, is as wide-spread as cities themselves. Every 
city of twenty thousand inhabitants has its country 
home suburbs. The larger the city, the more intensive 


158 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the movement. When we come to the great metropoli- 
tan, cities, the suburban movement is one of the best 
known, most highly favored, most wholesome movements 
of population in our day. 

While as yet the movement of homes to the suburbs 
has been one of middle-class families with some of the 
upper class, it is not uncommon to see an occasional real- 
estate subdivision where the poor have intrenched them- 
selves in comfortable cottages amid the splendors of 
clean air, space, and sunshine. The home-owning pos- 
sibility alone has justified the movement. In fact, the 
whole suburban movement has been generally regarded 
as one of America’s most hopeful revivals of home life. 

Replanning the city as a plact not to live in is viewed 
in this discussion as merely the extension of the subur- 
ban movement to its logical conclusion by the pressure 
of public opinion upon business, and by the enforcement 
of a police measure in cities. The argument for sun- 
shine homes is unanswerable. The terror of squeezed 
and suffocated homes is undeniable. The thing to be de- 
sired is proof that it can be done, taking the last soul 
out of the business city and giving it a sunshine home. 
Let us glance a bit at what it would involve to do this. 


ZONING THE CITY AGAINST DWELLINGS 


Zones in cities, marking localities and areas within 
which certain things must not be done, are well recog- 
nized in the municipal law of the United States. In a 
residence area, once it is established as a zone, business 
buildings of certain types are forbidden as a nuisance. 
Building zones are declared within which building mate- 


REPLANNING THE CITY 159 


rials must conform to fire-safe construction. In such fire 
zones no wooden structures are built. Parking zones are 
created for and against automobile parking. One-way 
streets are zones against vehicles going in a certain di- 
rection. Drinking-water reservoirs are zoned; school 
areas are zoned; hospital vicinities are zoned. In fact, 
there is no doubt of the utility of the principle of zoning 
nor about its recognition in law. 

The housing laws of cities recognize the public health 
and public morals as proper objects to be safeguarded. 
It is forbidden to dwell in houses characterized as a 
menace. It is forbidden to erect dwellings in certain 
positions. In Washington, D. C., the law forbade cer- 
tain residences fronting on the alleys of the city, and 
eviction of about fourteen thousand persons from alleys 
became imminent. But haste to comply with certain 
civic demands staved off the eviction. 

Between these two principles, viz., the zone within 
which certain things must not be done, and the housing 
law forbidding dwellings in certain conditions of menace 
to health and morals, the squeezed home stands in a 
plight unrecognized by law. | 

An application of the zoning principle against the 
dwelling of persons in certain congested business areas 
of the city would be sufficient as a beginning to test out 
the case. A year or three years might be given for re- 
adjustment before the zone became effective. The most 
dangerous districts, the most unqualifiedly business 
areas, once tried out, would show the value of the prin- 
ciple or the limitations of the policy. That the home 
would be the gainer there is small doubt. Let us con- 


160 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


sider a little further whether business itself would be 
likely to gain, also. 


TURNING THE City OvER COMPLETELY TO 
BUSINESS 


We have some idea and index of what it means to busi- 
ness to concentrate it, to segregate it, and give up every- 
thing in a certain unit area to that one thing. The great 
office-building or block, the great department-store, the 
large wholesale house, are examples of concentration of 
business, exclusion of dwelling. The steel-mill area, the 
brick-yard, the lumber-yard, the terminal railway yards 
are other examples. The rational occupation of the 
business area by business so as to have a monopoly over 
the space for business purposes should prove in the long 
run as profitable for business in general as the office- 
building is profitable for the exclusive aggregation of 
particular phases of business. 

One or two considerations are worth making in favor 
of this monopoly. A dwelling-house, or a dwelling apart- 
ment, or set of living and sleeping rooms, are so different 
in function from a building dedicated to business that 
we may well pause a moment to consider the difference 
as we think of the present junction of business and 
households. The dwelling is highly personal, and pri- 
vacy is its engaging characteristic. Freedom for people 
to be born, to live, to eat, to cleanse themselves, to be ill 
in hope of recovery, to die in peace; this wonderful 
freedom from intrusion is the genius of the home. The 
business building is public, impersonal. It is the shelter 
for machine processes or highly routine and mechanical 


REPLANNING THE CITY 161 


procedures. The psychology of the workers is not that 
of persons in homes and households. To blend these two 
types of building, to bring these two atmospheres to- 
gether, to constrain the psychology of business by the 
presence of the psychology of the home, or the psy- 
chology and humanity of the home by the presence of the 
psychology and materialism of business, is to put a bur- 
den upon business and a burden upon the home. To 
give freedom, perfect freedom, to business will help busi- 
ness. To give freedom to the home will make all the 
difference in the world to the home. Business men of 
the modern sort appreciate this freedom and will appre- 
ciate a monopoly of space, atmosphere, and immediate 
vicinity for business untrammeled by the near presence 
of a growing-up family. 

Because dwellings are more personal than business 
buildings, the property rights are more difficult to deal 
with. This handicaps business extension. The per- 
sistence of the squeezed dwelling in business territory is 
a living instance of the check of the dwelling-place upon 
business development. Sentiment is strong about a 
dwelling. But a factory is impersonal; it may always 
be bought, be torn down, and the site used as desired. 

When once business has a clear monopoly on space in 
the heart of a city, it should feel the impetus of a new 
type of organization, just as a mill does when it concen- 
trates and reconstructs, just as offices do when they fill 
an office-building. Among the advantages of zoning 
against dwelling in cities should be reckoned these great 
advantages of reorganizing the whole business of a city 
with respect to newly acquired space at the heart, and 


162 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


of a monopoly to do business without let or hindrance. 

The reorgaitization of streets would be possible for 
business purposes. Some park space could be vacated 
to business because no longer needed for homes. As a 
great fire usually cleans out a large space, and a new 
city rises from the ashes; so it is to be expected that the 
separation of business and dwelling would result in un- 
thought-of improvements in the business efficiency of a 
city. 

Tradition has held the squeezed home and growing 
business together. In a period of reconstruction like 
the present, such a great change in custom is timely. 
It is exceedingly dubious whether tradition has anything 
more back of its custom than the tendency to hold on to 
the past. Whether dwellers can be provided economi- 
eally with buildings and space close enough to their work 
we shall try to consider next. 


Hovusine THE Crry WORKERS IN SUBURBS 


Is there dwelling room in suburbs for all city work- 
ers? Can workers get to and from their city work? 
‘Will there be a loss in business efficiency when the man- 
labor lives far out and daily moves back and forth? 
Will not transportation prove an impossible burden? 
What will become of such public facilities as schools, 
churches, libraries, theaters? Many such questions rise 
to meet us. They can be answered only by engineers. 
But let us prepare the way by some discussion. 

Is there room outside cities? We are especially con- 
cerned with the 287 cities of twenty-five thousand inhab- 


REPLANNING THE CITY 163 


itants and over. In 1920, the U. S. Census informs us, 
there are 148 cities with a range from twenty-five thou- 
sand to fifty thousand inhabitants; seventy-six cities 
from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand; forty- 
three cities from one hundred thousand to two hundred 
and fifty thousand ; thirteen cities from two hundred and 
fifty thousand to five hundred thousand; nine cities from 
five hundred thousand to one million; three cities from 
oue million up. 

Of course no one knows how many square miles of 
eoncentrated ground-floor space will take care of busi- 
ness in cities of these different grades, when the dwell- 
ings of workers are removed. And it is not necessary 
to know in order to start our thinking. Let us take 
an arbitrary unit of space for the business of a city of 
twenty-five thousand people. Suppose we set aside 
four square miles as a business zone. Let us allow four 
persons to a dwelling. Give each dwelling half an acre 
of ground space. Then the city of twenty-five thousand 
will require as it stands not more than five square miles 
for residence floor space. 

If there be added to the proposed business zone of four 
square miles on all sides three fourths of a mile for 
residence, there would be available eight square miles, 
five of which could go to dwelling space and three to 
streets and parks. The farthest dwelling would be 
within three miles and a half of the business center and 
the nearest dwelling within one mile. 

A city of fifty thousand can be given a business. zone 
of ten square miles and a residence suburb of sixteen 
square miles, with the farthest dwelling five miles from 


164 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the business center and the nearest a mile and three 
quarters. 

Giving a city of two hundred and fifty thousand a 
business zone of forty-nine square miles and a residence 
district of eighty-two square miles would put the far- 
thest dwelling less than twelve miles from the business 
center and the nearest less than four miles. 

In a city of one million people, having a business zone 
of 196 square miles and a dwelling area of 320 square 
miles around it, the farthest dwelling would be twenty- 
three miles distant from the center of the business zone 
and the nearest seven miles. 

To accommodate the thirty-seven millions of people 
dwelling in the 287 cities would require suburban land 
to the amount of something over fourteen thousand 
square miles, an area equivalent to one quarter of the 
State of Florida. 

The big economic problem is that of transporting the 
workers daily to and from the business area, distances 
ranging from three to twenty-three miles. This is a 
technical matter in engineering; it would be folly for 
us to venture a plan. Beyond the belief that American 
skill is equal to the problem it is unwise in this discus- 
sion to go. History has shown us that it is safer to be- 
lieve in the triumphs of transportation than to believe 
in its impotency. 

The vast projects of house-building, street-making, 
sewers, electric lighting, gas, can be easily seen as mighty 
obstacles. But Americans require chance for mighty 
deeds. This proposal has a dauntless element in it, a 
challenge both to philanthropy and to business. 


REPLANNING THE CITY 165 


Only an enterprise as big as this to save the American 
home will lift the human elements in American life 
above the strapping shoulders of business. This proj- 
ect would give a new point of view to almost every civic 
problem. It would freshen American living. 


CHAPTER XII 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 


It would seem so. In any era of the nation, 

agriculture must have its personnel. The competi- 

tion for workers among all industries is keen, so keen 

in fact that a net annual movement of a million agri- 

cultural population from farms to cities in America 
is not an unheard-of event. 

The problem of holding an efficient, contented farm 
population on the land, sufficient in numbers and quali- 
fied in skill to produce the nation’s food needs, be- 
comes, in part, a problem of keeping the fundamental 
advantages of farm life before the public mind. Here 
is where a discriminating press can render great service, 
and where an unthinking, uncaring press can do irrep- 
arable damage to farm life without being aware of 
doing damage at all. 

But much more than the advantages must be kept 
before the public. Every bit of progress in lessening the 
disadvantages of farm life must be recorded and given 
wide circulation when it is news. Just how to present 
the advantages which appeal to the class of people that 
is needed on farms, and how to give currency to the im- 


provement of those conditions which have always given 
166 


[ the defense of farm life properly a problem? 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 167 


rise to adverse criticisms on farm life, makes a problem 
worthy of the mettle of any editor. If we can success- 
fully give a glimpse at the line of defense that may be 
put up by a discriminating press, we shall do all that is 
required of us here. 


Tur Source oF A Sure LIVING 


The first great advantage of farming, from the point 
of view of the family and perhaps especially of the 
woman in the farm home, is that farming provides a 
sure living. 

If a family cannot make a living on a farm, it is 
questionable whether it can make a living at anything. 
Dire poverty is not, in America at least, a feature of 
farm life as it is of city life. This holds true, whether 
the family is in the position of owning a farm, renting a 
farm, or working for wages on a farm. The farm fam- 
ily eats, is sheltered, is warmed, and always is in posses- 
sion of a job. 

This characteristic of farm life, a sure living, will 
especially appeal to the home-maker and mother of a 
family. To be free from the worry of ‘‘losing the 
job’”’ is, for the woman at least, to enjoy life day by 
day, if life has any joys, without the dark cloud of a 
lost job, an empty cupboard, no money to pay next 
month’s rent, no fuel in the bin. 

In the city, the illness of the breadwinner may bring 
the storm from the cloud; on the farm, illness of the man 
does not mean giving up the job. Others in the family 
ean carry on the work and thus bridge over the illness. 

Many a woman, reared on a farm but marrying into a 


168 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


city-working home, has felt the strain of life just at the 
point of an assured living. And there are thousands of 
women, at least, with whom the one great advantage 
of a sure living for all in the home will overcome all ob- 
jections there may be to farm life. 

Let a Maryland farm woman tell her own view of this 
matter: 


My daughter will have a better home on the farm than she 
could have in the city as the wife of a modest-salaried man, 
whom she would be likely to marry. The farm home we oc- 
cupy could not be found within the city limits except in some 
such suburb as Chevy Chase, near Washington, D. C., and a 
house there of its size, with our lawn and garden plot, would 
cost a sum of money utterly out of reach of any but people of 
great wealth. Our home is a large, well-built, comfortable 
farm-house with the modern conveniences found on most good 
farms to-day. 

She never will have to worry about the actual necessities of 
life, although Juxuries may be wanting. 

She will have plenty of the sort of food necessary to make 
strong, healthy bodies for her family (and morals depend a 
great deal on vigor of body). 

Few indeed are the years on the farm when there is not 
some surplus money above actual living needs. When the 
property is paid for, this money can nearly always be counted 
on to provide something to make life seem even more worth 
living. For instance, we have an automobile, travel is not un- 
known to us, and we have, generally, a higher standard of ac- 
tual comfort in living than our city friends and relatives. 
(Yet they pity me!) 

No matter what may happen, there is always the property 
itself for a fresh start, a new chance every spring. The farm 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 169 


owner is never jobless and, though many times short of cash, 
is never a candidate for the poorhouse. 


AFFORDING A HEALTH ENVIRONMENT 


It has never been successfully contradicted that the 
farm provides an environment for health unequaled by 
the city. The statistics of the army draft did not over- 
throw the general tradition that country life is healthful. 
The few detached investigations of country school- 
children, while disclosing the presence of certain minor 
physical defects, especially with eyes, throat, nose, and 
teeth—entirely preventable by skilled attention—do not 
throw any doubt upon the healthful environment of 
country life. 

The fact is that a life in sunshine, in drafts of fresh 
air, in zones of quiet, in plenty of space, in contact with 
nature, is simply unmatchable for basic health. It is 
health environment par excellence for man as for plant 
or animal. 

No emphasis on city parks, city gymnasiums, city med- 
ical service, newspaper health columns, city sanitation, 
and city conveniences—splendid as they all are—can 
throw dust in our eyes about the basic advantages of 
free sunlight, air, space, and quiet found in quantities 
in farm life. The high price of these much-sought-after 
goods of life in the city is itself ample proof of their 
basic value. The goal of city engineering is to give 
sunlight, air, space, and quiet where they are most 
needed. 

So serious is the deficiency in these basic health fac- 
tors of the city as a dwelling-place organized along with 


170 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


business that we have urged replanning the city as a 
place not to*live in. Persons who are accustomed to 
look forward in life to the effects upon their homes of 
possessing the basie standard things of life will know 
the difference between the basic health advantages of 
farm life and the acquired advantages of city life. 


AN OccuUPATION oF UNDOUBTED NATIONAL SERVICE 


Does it or does it not matter to one whether one’s oc- 
cupation fits into a scheme for national well-being? Is 
that what we mean by an honorable ealling, fitting in to 
well-being? And do men and women prize special honor 
in occupations ? 

No doubt many men listen to the call of honor in 
life-work. And no doubt that call of honor is more and 
more based upon service, real service to the nation. 
The ideal of service in occupation has filtered into life 
and settled into the mass so that the ‘‘white wing’’ 
street cleaner, in keeping a clean street, holds his head 
up because he is aware of doing great public service. In 
a democracy the lowly hold their self-esteem through 
service; and consciousness of publie service to the na- 
tion and to humanity is a sort of psychie wealth, which, 
like a good conscience or a good character, is held as a 
precious possession. 

Agriculture may almost, without stretching the literal 
truth, be viewed as in the public service; if not bearing 
the same formal relation to government as the army and 
navy, or even the National Guard, still under govern- 
ment protection and encouragement, because it is so 
basic. To grow food and fiber for a nation seems none 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 171 


the less a great public service and function because it 
is organized as a private business. It seems too im- 
portant an element in national existence, not to say well- 
being and progress, to allow to depend solely for its de- 
velopment upon the ebb and flow of unencouraged 
private supply and demand. Statesmen of the higher 
type regard agriculture, therefore, as under the ken of 
the government, against even momentary decline. Thus 
agriculture ranks with the military arm as national 
service. 

The service character of farming is distinctly a part 
of the farmer’s inner view of his work. He glories in 
his job’s being beyond question. As the crops of his 
fields stand open to the passer-by, as his cattle and sheep 
are silhouetted against the sky for the gaze of any one 
who may wish to see, so his business throughout is an 
open book. How different from the businesses done in 
dark corners! How different from businesses of ques- 
tionable character on the border-land of propriety! An 
open book! Service in the open, for all people, for the 
poor as well as the rich, for whosoever is hungry and is 
in need to keep soul and body together! 

In the defense of farm life, service, public service, 
national service, will stand against many gibes! 


FURNISHING IpEAL HomMr CoNpITIONS 


Men and women of a domestic temper who look for- 
ward to home-making and home-living as the largest 
goal in life may well consider farm life as furnishing 
ideal home conditions. The farm is the ideal native 
place. If all children could be born in farm homes in 


172 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


close contact with nature at large and brought up to 
adolescence on farms in connection with farm work, the 
nation would be better off. If the rights of children can 
be taken into account before they are born—the right to 
be brought up in space, in sunshine, under the broad 
sky—then farm life should enter the thinking of all 
who are of a domestic turn of mind. A look into the 
situation will lighten up the advantages. 

While health environment will figure largely in this 
set of ideal home conditions—this factor we have already 
considered—it is a question whether even this basic ele- 
ment outranks one other; namely, the opportunity for 
children to be initiated into life through the processes 
of work. The farm provides grades of work adapted to 
the tender years of children. Boys and girls can both 
find employment suited to their years which will supple- 
ment the school in an education that is an actual ap- 
prenticeship to life. Work is man’s salvation. The 
work habit is one of the triumphs of civilization. 

The attempt to rear a family in the city, with no out- 
let for the energies of the children in useful labor, is 
one of the domestic problems of the city in our day. 
Failure is nearly sure to be the result. The alternative 
is premature work for children as wage-earners, without 
education. 

The home itself—father, mother, children, and some 
other relatives like grandmother, uncle, or distant cou- 
sin—is a well knit social fabric, if it is a farm home. 
Two conditions make it so. One is work itself, which 
we have touched on with respect to the children. Every- 
body works. And they work at related tasks, close to 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 173 


the hearth, close to the dinner-table. The product is a 
common product. Their interest in land, home, capital, 
and products is unified. This interest is spread also 
from grandfather to grandchild in the life of the grand- 
father. On the other hand, in city life, the home is 
kept together, if at all, by sheer resourcefulness. The 
social forces and work forces of the city are distracting. 

The farm home is the original home. It lays claim to 
being still the normal home. Not all persons are home- 
bodies, home-makers. Not all women, even, care pre- 
eminently for a successful home life. But for those per- 
sons who are domestic, heart and soul, the farm offers 
the largest opportunity in America for a successful 
home. 

A letter from a Vermont farm woman to her daughter 
rings true to the American farm woman’s belief in the 
future of the farm home: 


Dear Mary: 

Your letter saying that there is nothing that you “want so 
much as a chance at farm life with David” makes us very 
happy. 

We have had some quiet amusement over Aunt Florence’s 
objections. From her standpoint, they are natural enough. 
One is born “rural-minded” or one is not. Her views have 
been distorted by newspaper, magazine, stage, and govern- 
ment statistics proving (?) the drudgery of farm life. Hap- 
pily you realize its beauty and value. 

Life’s values are not measured by such standards as ease of 
living, fashionable clothes, and carefully tended hands. Serv- 
ice makes living beautiful. There is no reason why a farm 
woman should neglect her personal appearance. Your splen- 


174 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


did health and David’s, with your fine ideals for home and 
community life, would make you shine anywhere. 

Both of you love to work and are especially adapted to 
country living. Your tastes are domestic. Your love for ani- 
mals and gardening will make you in sympathy with David’s 
ventures in crops and cows. You delight to see the sun rise! 

Both of you understand that it is the discipline of the farm, 
the insistence of its duties, the certainties of its penalties and 
the great fact that you are working with nature in the things 
that make the world go, that make the farmer a broad, self- 
reliant, forceful individual. Strength is refreshed daily be- 
cause he is dealing with the elemental facts of life. 

David’s social instincts match yours. Denied the finest lec- 
tures, concerts, dramas, your opportunities will be great for 
helping to secure worth-while recreation for a large, scattered, 
needy group. School and church need your help. I believe 
with Bailey that “a man cannot be a good farmer unless he is 
a religious man.” 

“The fellowship of the productive life,’ says Carver, “does 
not offer the insult of a life of ease or esthetic enjoyment or 
emotional eestasy. It offers, instead, the joy of productive 
achievement, of participation in the Kingdom of God.” Read 
it with David. 

Do not be disturbed because you cannot start with all of 
the labor-savers. Things were shabby when we began. Half 
the fun of having “things” is in working intelligently for 
them. You will have a fairly convenient house, running 
water, and a good wood-pile! Father jokes about my meas- 
uring a man by water and wood, but there is more in it than 
appears. 

Your small musical talent enriches your life. Rosalie has 
real talent. I feel as certain that she should not marry a 
farmer as that you should, since it is to be David. When she 
considers marriage, I hope that she will find her husband 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 175 


among one of the other honorable professions. Note the 
“other.” There is no more honorable profession than farm- 
ing; but each for the niche for which he is best fitted to play 
his part in the world. 


PROVIDING A CAREER FOR WOMEN 


The modern woman thinks she has a natural right to 
the joys of a career, an occupation, a line of creative 
effort, over and above the responsibilities of home- 
making. However this contention may be decided 
finally, true it is, and it is worth stating here, that farm 
women have always had an occupation in addition to 
home-making. 

They are in line with the modern demand of women, 
therefore. They have found themselves able to rear a 
family and also to take part in the occupation of agri- 
culture. In this occupation they have found engross- 
ing interest. Not only have they had a hand in earn- 
ing the livelihood of the home, but they have had the 
joy of an intellectual interest in the miracles of growth 
about them. This interest in the business of farming 
has been a relief from the routine of housekeeping and 
home care. A more capable, a more resourceful woman 
has been the result of this business interest. 

It is not uncommon to find an unmarried woman own- 
ing and operating a farm. The unmarried woman in 
agriculture, it has been demonstrated, can find an out- 
let to a large business ability and a considerable surplus 
of energy. Fruit raising, dairying, poultry keeping, 
bee keeping, and many other forms of agriculture are 
especially adapted to the skill and tastes of women, and 


176 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


many unmarried women can make a decided hit at these 
forms of land working. 

Farm life offers no inducement to the weak-kneed, 
the idle, the mentally and physically soft woman. But 
to the vigorous, the capable, the domestic, there is the 
inducement of something over and above the home, and 
yet akin to it, to engage the life. 

A Missouri farm woman plainly states the farm 
woman’s work creed: 


Agriculture offers the oldest and finest profession known. 
To till the land and raise live stock to eat the feed that the 
farm produces, to send out the food that the other half of the 
world requires, is a service without which life itself could not 
endure. 

I love the farm, and I had rather be known as a farm 
woman than by any other name. I want to spend every bit 
of my strength and intelligence and every day of my life mak- 
ing farming more alluring. I find keenest zest in the fight 
that we farmers must make, if we are to secure the right fu- 
ture for our work. 

Why should I wish my daughter to be any less blessed, or 
to have to be satisfied with serving a lesser cause? 

I want my daughter to marry a farmer. I hope, if she is 
so fortunate, that he may be college or university trained. I 
hope he may regard agriculture as man’s divinest vocation, 
worthy of the thoughtful and best effort of the highest intelli- 
gence. With my daughter as a real partner, I should wish 
him to work to make farming the most respected of profes- 
sions and farm life happier. 

I want my daughter to bear hardships more bravely, not 
to be relieved of them; to meet difficulties more sturdily; to 
face motherhood as the “heritage of the Lord.’”’ I want her to 


DEFENDING FARM ‘LIFE 177 


help build a home in which children may grow, who will some 
day carry on the ideals and continue the service that I shall 
have to leave unfinished. 

The banker may succeed and his wife know nothing of his 
business; the farmer’s wife must be a helper. I glory in the 
character that such a partnership develops in a woman. I 
wish my daughter to know the conscious joy of it. 


Comina To Possess Mopern SocraL FACILITIES 


The new farmer who is displacing the pioneer type, 
the hoe type, the traditional static type, 1s in possession 
of modern facilities for convenience and comfort in hous- 
ing, for ease and comfort in transportation, for com- 
munity education, religious meetings, recreation, and 
health. That is, it rests with the farmer now whether 
he will have these home facilities, and it rests with the 
farm community whether it will have the social facilities. 
In other words, there is no longer in the nature of farm 
life in America a bar to the possession of facilities for 
comfort, social life, and culture. And so many farm 
communities in every State have solved the problem of 
social facilities so satisfactorily that facilities can already 
be listed as an advantage in farm existence. 

The middle-aged city capitalist who happened to have 
been raised on a farm a generation ago may still think 
that farm life carries with it of necessity a meager, 
lonely, and sterile existence. His memory may be good. 
But his information is not up to date. Farming pos- 
sesses potentially all the basic social advantages of city 
life and industry; many farming communities possess 
these social and cultural advantages in reality; many 
others have begun to equip themselves; while a few 


178 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


farm communities in the United States are unstirred by 
the good news of the country life movement, which prom- 
ises that all farm communities may have the basic social 
advantages of the most favored community. 

The good roads movement is making the automobile 
effective in reducing all country distances so much that 
distance may now be eliminated as an inevitable barrier 
to social life on the farm. Distance now becomes an ad- 
vantage. Space and quiet mean retirement to life, to 
thought, to pleasure, and not separation from all that 
people love. 

Hope is in the trend. The new farming is bringing 
the new home. New farm homes are bringing the new 
rural schools. The new rural schools are making pos- 
sible all other advantages. A Virginian lets you into 
her experience: 


I was born and raised on a farm but grew up knowing ab- 
solutely nothing about it. My parents, edueated, cultivated 
Virginians of the old school, were not disposed to let me go 
over the place. If I ever so much as put foot in the barn lot, 
my father said, “Now, little daughter, run to the house with 
your mother.” There were few good roads, no ears, not many 
telephones, so the farm was jail to me; I hated it. By the 
time I was grown I would willingly have given my interest 
in the home place to anybody that would accept. The beau- 
tiful meadows, the orchard, the cool, deep woods—none of it 
for me. But then came a change. My mother died. Father 
was an invalid, and my own health was bad. He and I spent 
a winter in the city, and there the scales fell from my eyes. 
I saw his longing for the old home, and I felt my longing, so 
back we came. His joy was indescribable, and mine was al- 
most equal. Life was a revelation to me. How near I had 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 179 


come to losing the very best opportunities ever offered to me! 

I now have happiness, health, content—three blessings I 
had searcely known before. There have been innumerable ob- 
stacles, but each one overcome has made me stronger. I have 
gardened, milked, canned, built fences, sheds, split wood— 
anything to get along—because I loved the farm and was 
determined to succeed if my efforts would mean success. 

Farms can have all the conveniences and comforts of town 
homes, with the added luxuries of the restfulness of the 
country. Good roads are becoming prevalent, and automobiles 
have eliminated distance. My girl’s happiness is great to be- 
hold, when she comes in from a ride on a load of hay or 
the tractor-plow, wheat-drill or corn-planter. She knows and 
goes all the rounds a great deal more at ten years of age than 
I did at twenty-five. JI am raising her to be a good wife for a 
good farmer, for there is where I believe she will find great- 
est happiness and usefulness. She will go to him prepared 
for life as far as I am able to teach her and have her taught. 
Oh, if I could only make people realize how full of possibility 
is the country life and how rich in blessings! 


WHAT OF THE DISADVANTAGES ? 


In defending farm life, and in displaying the basic 
advantages that are superior to any, it is not wise, it is 
not truthful, to assert that these advantages will produce 
happiness. These advantages, great as they are, will not 
prevent nor neutralize the many trials incident to life 
itself, whatever one’s occupation or living-place. Life is 
charged with disappointment, unforeseen and unpre- 
ventable disease, accident, uncongenial marriage. The 
frailties inherent in life itself must be laid at the door 
of life, not farm life. 

Farm life cannot be held responsible for the illusions 


180 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


which beset man, which make him think that some other 
occupation or some other living-place holds in store for 
him the ideal, and which make him an unhappy wan- 
derer. Personal tragedy, one might almost say, enters 
life by every door. 

But there are disadvantages to farm life that are of 
an honorable character from whatever angle one views it. 
Not every one has the rugged physique required. Many 
occupations are therefore superior to farming for those 
of a physical heritage of less endurance. It is patent 
that in accommodating one’s work to abilities and tastes, 
the vast array of occupations offer to a person competing 
inducements that cannot be gainsaid. Only those who 
revel in the freedom of outdoor life should think of 
farming. 

But still we must admit the presence at this moment 
of real disadvantages even in the view of those who 
would like to farm. These have been somewhat con- 
sidered by us and set aside lightly as deficiencies in social 
facilities which are not inherent in farm life itself, but 
rather belong to a tradition and a period of frontiering 
that is rapidly breaking up and giving way. This sort 
of disadvantage is more prevalent in some regions of the 
United States than others. The lack of surfaced high- 
ways arranged into community systems, the lack of hos- 
pitals, of high schools, of libraries, of first-class trading 
centers, of noble churches, of organized recreation— 
these lacks and deficiencies are still so real in many 
places that it requires a great hope to wait for a full tide 
of social facilities to come. 

All that can be urged at this point is that those who 


DEFENDING FARM LIFE 181 


tire and despair—well, let them go. Those who believe 
and have a store of energy, let them come and let them 
stay and let them put their brains at work, and the face 
of the land will begin to smile just as in spring it smiles 
with flowers. Most of the basic disadvantages of farm 
life will melt away, awaiting only this determined hope 
and a social mentality. 


THE PRESENT AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION 


But it will be said, in fact, it is being said quite 
pointedly every day, ‘‘There are too many million bush- 
els of wheat raised in America, too many farms, too 
many farmers, and too many farm homes.’’ A sigh of 
relief goes up around the national breakfast-table when 
in the morning news one reads that half a million people 
left the farms last year. ‘‘Less farm production,’’ 
‘‘higher prices to farmers’’—perhaps living prices for 
farm products to those who remain on the farms—‘‘more 
people to feed in the cities,’’ ‘‘less distress on the 
farm,’’ ‘‘less worry for statesmen over discontented 
farmers,’’ are the net result. Under the circumstances, 
is there any need of a defense of farm life? Would we 
not be better employed in pointing out the drawbacks 
to farming and to a life in the country ? 

The answer is unmistakable: The danger to the na- 
tion has always been that, in any time of loss of farm 
population, it might be the good farmers who would go, 
the most intelligent, the most experienced, and those 
possessing the best country traditions. That danger ex- 
ists to-day. The loss of two million farm people in itself 
is not regrettable. In fact, it may be the best way out; 


182 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


but the nation could ill afford to lose even one million 
of its very best farm people. This is the reason why 
every farm family that is tempted to sell out now under 
fire and the strain of bad times should count over the 
blessings of farm life before making the decision to jump 
to the city. The depression of agriculture is temporary. 
There are many farm workers so situated that they can 
go to the city without involving the break-up of a long- 
established farm home. Let these go. But let the econo- 
mist who is about to advise farmers promiscuously to 
sell out and go to the city take counsel with his heart 
and advise cautiously. For it takes a long time to pro- 
duce a good farmer, and the country community can 
least afford to lose its leadership in bad times; the nation 
would not be the least loser in such a ease. 


CHAPTER XIII 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION TO AND 
FROM FARMS 


r \ HE movements of races from land to land have 
afforded the anthropologist and the historian 
- the makings for their books. Romance, trag- 
edy, civilization; war, conquest, oppression, absorption ; 
the rise and fall of nations; the creation and extinction 
of cultures. Migration, immigration, emigration, suffo- 
cation of peoples, enrichment of peoples, will ever be 
themes for thinkers. The mixing of the human in- 
gredients, whether by single atoms or by molecules, will 
furnish forth the new type alongside the old. With 
these interracial, international points of view every- 
body is more or less familiar. We know the usual mo- 
tives; we know the general results. Within our own 
national borders, however, we have population move- 
ments which vitally concern the welfare of the nation 
and with which we are not very fully acquainted. It is 
the purpose of this discussion to consider one of these 
internal movements, and to see what we can see, even 
though we cannot hope to see all that is going on. 


Movements ADJUSTING TO OCCUPATION 


Vocation, work for a livelihood, occupation so called, 
is, in America at least, always on trial. It is like the 
183 


184 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


American farm, always for sale or exchange, simply 
awaiting ar, attractive price. America’s youth, the 
wealth of opportunity still connected with all phases of 
enterprise, provide the conditions for a real competition 
among occupations, not simply for unskilled workers, 
but for skilled managers, proprietors, and investors. 
This competition, accompanied by wide advertisement, 
by announcement of great opportunities, makes its at- 
tack upon the man who is working under difficulties in 
his own vocation and upon the man who is ambitious. 
Wide-spread education has given many men the basic 
training for more than one kind of job. 

Farming is in this competition along with the busi- 
ness and professional enterprises of the city. Young 
men reared on farms, coming to an age of decision as to 
a life-work, start in naturally with farming. In the 
course of a few years they become dissatisfied with their 
work, and change to city work. Taking the United 
States as a whole, the number of men and women leav- 
ing the farm for the city because of dissatisfaction with 
the work and the occupation must amount to a con- 
siderable item. This movement will be a stream, we may 
surmise, of fairly regular proportions, augmented in 
times of agricultural depression, diminished in periods 
of agricultural prosperity. Whether this stream flows 
by way of the village and small town to the cities, or di- 
rectly to the major cities, we surmise but do not exactly 
know. 

Partly compensating for this loss to farming of farm- 
ers who decide to become city enterprisers, is a return 
stream to the farm of young men who prefer farming to 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 185 


city business, and of some farm-bred men who find the 
city a difficult place to work in and decide to go back 
where they know what they can depend upon. This 
return stream of men trying to adjust themselves to a 
business which they can enjoy and do best in, is pre- 
sumably—no one knows with accuracy for any portion 
of the country—smaller than the stream toward the city. 
In these two streams will be young unmarried women 
as well as young men. Some young women go to the 
town with the same motive as the young men; they 
prefer work that is not farming. Some go because they 
prefer the new woman’s independent type of life, in 
connection with an unmarried woman’s type of city 
occupation. A few young farm women constantly leave 
farming by the marriage route with young men of the 
town; and a return stream of brides from town is 
partial compensation. It would add greatly to our 
knowledge of the interrelations of farm and city, town 
and country, to have these two streams surveyed, charted, 
and mapped, so to speak, for the United States as a 
whole. 

There is another adjustment to the occupational fea- 
tures that must engage our notice at this point. The 
newness of America has brought within the domain of 
farming itself a severe competition among different lo- 
calities in the same State and among different States. 
Types of farming are competitors with one another. 
Types of land compete for farmers. Low-priced farms 
compete with high-priced farms. An active, indeed a 
most surprising and astounding mobility, not to say in- 
stability, of farm people has characterized American 


186 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


farming for the past one hundred years. Though new, 
cheap lands are almost gone, still the movement from 
farm to farm continues. In tenant farming, the move- 
ment is especially conspicuous, though the movement may 
be only from farm to farm within the same county. The 
Eastern farmers went west, then south; now Middle- 
West farmers are going east and south. In the border 
States of the Northwest farmers in the settled southern 
parts will go to newer northern parts. These currents 
and cross-currents of farm families trying to adjust their 
farms to their lkings are full of importance to the 
progress of the farm population up the hill of eulture 
and attainment. These streams await the chart, com- 
pass, and map. These adjustments to occupation, to 
type of work, are such as are causing an attempt to bet- 
ter working conditions. 

There are other movements which, though changing 
the farmer to a townsman or the townsman to a farmer, 
are related to other motives more strongly than to mere 
ambition to get on in business. 


MovEMENTS ADJUSTED ACCORDING TO AGE 


A steady stream of young men and women between 
the ages of eighteen and twenty-four are moving from 
the farm homes to city life seeking their fortunes. They 
cannot be farmers. They area surplus. They are those 
members of their families least desirous of remaining on 
farms, and so they go into the cities, where they swell 
the ranks of all classes of occupation. They are the 
so-called new blood and energy given by farm life to 
city life and labor, They supply many men and women 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 187 


of note, statesmen, governors, captains of industry; 
women of letters, wives of bankers, physicians. Al- 
though we do not know with sufficient accuracy to make a 
statistical estimate, we have assurance that this surplus 
of adolescents reaches about half the annual national 
crop of rural young men and women graduating from 
childhood to business careers. The implications of the 
free gift of the farm to the city are far-reaching and 
will finally be taken into account by economists, sociolo- 
gists, and statesmen when a rational, statistical balance 
is effected between the opportunities of farm people and 
city people. 

The back-flow of adolescents from the city to the farm 
has never been calculated. It has probably been under- 
estimated. Because of the cityward movement of adoles- 
cents from many a farm home, title to farms often falls 
into the hands of city people through the very natural 
process of inheritance. In some of these cases, undoubt- 
edly, a door is open for the return of land-loving youth 
from the city to the old homesteads. Not enough is 
known about this movement to estimate its volume or to 
value its contribution to farm life and culture. Here 
again chart, compass, and map are needed. Are there 
periodic cycles in this movement? Nobody knows. Rise 
in the value of farm lands, prosperity in farming, may 
increase the flow. Nobody knows. 

It is hardly necessary to mention the annual flow away 
from farm homes to high school, college, and university 
or training-schools. Temporarily, at least, it takes out 
of the community much of the energy of the youth. But 
some of these are flowing back in a constant rivulet. 


188 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


This movement means much to the mental side of farm 
life. An ambassador is at the court of learning. He 
gives, but he also takes, and hands it on to his home. 

One of the most talked-about movements, but one that 
is perhaps little known after all, is that age adjustment 
known as the retired farmer movement. The farmer 
reaches an age when his physical ability to cope with 
farm problems is found wanting. Whatever his ambi- 
tion may be, whatever his likes may be, he must unload 
his burden. Then begins a new adjustment. Some 
study on this phase of farm life goes to show that the 
farmer shifts his burden little by little and eases him- 
self by degrees. Instead of jumping to town or city on 
the first consciousness of failing strength, he tries va- 
rious expedients, holding on, giving up his duties one by 
one, dividing his farm, selling or renting a part or 
buying a smaller farm, ever moving nearer town, until 
all the way to town he goes. This phenomenon of re- 
tiring to the city because of age turns out to be a sort of 
dilatory retreat under pressure. But the end usually 
comes in town or city. The stream is a constant, slow- 
moving current. It carries the glories of autumn; it 
carries the tragedies of sleety storms. The human tale 
of this retreat has not yet been written. The statistics 
of this movement will illuminate, when fully known, the 
passing of many a title-deed from farm community to 
city enterprise. 

There is a certain return trickling back to the land 
from the city, because of the retirement from the arduous 
labors of city industry. The trickle is in no sense com- 
parable, however, either in its numbers or in its effects 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 189 


upon farm life, to the retreat of the aged farmer. It is 
wasteiul to continue guessing and surmising our facts 
about these age movements. We are all eager for in- 
formation about the movements hither and yon of raw 
materials—coal, copper, wheat, cotton, iron. Business 
depends on knowledge. But good relations in life, espe- 
cially group life and class life, depend upon knowledge, 
too. 


MoveMEnts RELATED TO HEALTH AND PLEASURE 


The farmer is becoming acquainted with the climate 
of Florida and California, or Colorado and Montana. 
The prosperous farmer becomes a health-seeker, a mild 
climate hunter. He seeks, after his years of labor, even 
while his basic energies are still in their prime, the 
gentler winters of the favored States or advertised re- 
gions. The automobile is brought into play, perhaps, for 
a long trip south or west. The farmer as an active cli- 
mate seeker, still holding title to his farm, still consider- 
ing himself a real ‘‘dirt farmer,’’ is evidence of a rise in 
social and economic status. Here is no peasant gloom- 
ing around the hearth-fire; here are a man and woman 
who say, ‘‘Lo, there is California! Oranges, roses, sun- 
shine, warmth. Let ’s go.’’ 

And they can go. And they do go. And they come 
back. And they work the farm and talk about Cali- 
fornia. They talk about the Mission Play, earthquakes, 
Tia Juana, the reunion of Iowans or New Yorkers (most 
of them farmers back home). They talk about farmer 
high schools, and compulsory education up to the eight- 
eenth year. They carry back some of the bignesses of 


190 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


life in the Far West to their little farm communities 
farther east. To know this movement better would as- 
sist us to understand the farmer as a human being, and 
take some of the curse from our thinking him ‘‘queer.’’ 

A second movement away from farms and farming is 
not so complimentary to farm life. This is the move- 
ment to town of parents with children from the age 
of eleven to fifteen years, for the sheer purpose of giving 
these children a proper education. The decision is not 
always foreseen by parents. Children come, and the 
years of infancy are so long, so perilous, so full of anx- 
iety that parents hardly realize the children are almost 
grown, until it comes to them with the force of an earth- 
shock. They then decide to move for a few years. 
They move to educate, and sometimes they never come 
back. Sometimes they return disappointed with life. 
Sometimes they come back with renewed love for the 
farm. As the educational ideal grows among farmers, 
one of two things happens: either proper schools are es- 
tablished among farmers, or more good farmers leave 
farms and go to town to edueate their children. This 
movement, while perhaps not totally bad for farming, 
is certainly a menace to farming; for it takes away the 
best people, just when they are of value to the com- 
munity, for a purpose which, in most instances, could 
be met by community action at home. The rapid incom- 
ing of grade schools and high schools for farm children 
will, it is to be hoped, lessen this movement, which is an 
adjustment to the happiness of farm families. How 
sadly we need in America a survey of this movement! 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 191 


Going away to be near schools, or to be near hospitals, 
or physicians, or libraries, is a going which our genera- 
tion will surely check. 

Touring, travel, sight-seeing, not for health, not to get 
a better farm, but for plain pleasure, curiosity about 
America, information, culture, to break the grind of 
labor, are in good farm form and in general vogue. 

‘* Back where I was born.’’ 

That ’s the story. 

‘*T just wanted my boys and girls to see where I went 
to school. Not that I didn’t want to see the old place 
myself, for I did. But I wanted the pleasure of showing 
it to my children.’’ 

No peasant here. No sticking to one mountain-side or 
plain all one’s life. Here is getting about. Here is the 
impetus to compare conditions. 


SEASONAL LABor MoveEMENTS 


Agricultural laborers are of several kinds: the all- 
year-round type; the spring, summer, and fall type; 
the seasonal type. The last two types are subject to 
considerable movement. Moving on to a farm in early 
spring, quitting in late autumn, one type lives possibly 
in town or city during the winter or just hibernates on 
some farm. The seasonal laborer, such as the wheat or 
harvest hand of the wheat belt, the beet-sugar workers, 
the berry pickers, and the like, move out of everywhere 
and nowhere, mobilize on farms, do their job, and evapo- 
rate again. The story has been told, but not thoroughly. 
We need to see the stream dispersing as well as assem- 


192 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


bling. We need to know its social as well as its eco- 
nomic bearing. 3 


MoveEMENTS OF TEACHERS AND CLERGYMEN 


Everybody knows, after a fashion, that the rural 
teacher force is a mobile body of young women. Just 
where they emanate from and where they go to no one 
has told us. The material is ready for a more definite 
knowledge of this movement. All that is necessary 1s 
making a statistical assemblage of school data. The 
movement away from rural schools is so vital that we 
should know it better. The charge is often made that 
city-bred girls are teaching country children city ways. 
We should see just how this stands. The windings of 
the stream need charting. 

What is true of rural teachers has been more or less 
true of rural ministers. Young men move in and serve 
rural churches. Soon they move on, and then they move 
out of the rural domain. This movement of rural lead- 
ers in and out needs not only a quantitative estimation 
but a rational explanation. 


THE PROBLEM OF THE POPULATION MovEMENTS 


So long as America’s knowledge of these movements 
to and from farms and farm communities is purely cas- 
ual, glimpsed here and there, observed in spots only, 
never accurately measured, never reduced to scientific 
terms, America will not know the problem in any con- 
vincing manner. It has been assumed in times gone by 
that losses of population from agriculture were a menace, 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 193 


being a symptom of something decidedly wrong with 
rural society and with the nation’s treatment of the 
farmer. The alarm created by a decrease in rural popu- 
lation has been one of our national nightmares. ‘‘The 
farm people are leaving the farms; how can we hold 
them?’’ This has been the editorial year after year. 

There has been no discriminating analysis of who is 
leaving, or why he is leaving, or whether any one is com- 
ing in, or why any one should come in. A rational ad- 
justment to occupation, resulting in a decline of the 
number of farmers, may be a good thing for farm and 
town. But who knows the difference between a rational 
and an illusory, foolish adjustment? Who is prepared 
to assist in the matter of adjustment? Ah! Here is 
where we need our exact knowledge. There are those 
fitted to advise, if only they knew the facts in the case. 
To facilitate adjustment to the kind of occupation for 
which one’s ability and training equip him, is a good 
thing. A really good farmer turned into a poor mer- 
chant, garage man, or factory foreman is a shame and a 
pity. A poor farmer who could be a good contractor 
should go to the city. It is poor politics, poor eco- 
nomics, poor statesmanship, to advise all farmers to 
farm, all industrialists to stick to their jobs whether 
or no. 

The movement to cities of a surplus of the adolescents 
is, perhaps, the most significant national movement of 
people from the farms. The problem here, again, is to 
know what is happening; to know how it stands in point 
of quantity; to know whether it is taking care of itself 


194 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


in a reasonable, sane, healthful way. If one child must 
go as a surplus and one must stay, the important thing is 
to have the right one and not the wrong one go. It is 
not necessary that one from each family should go. Two 
may go from one family, two stay in another. To make 
the social break in family and community life with good 
results to farm family, farm community, and city in- 
dustry and community, it should take place under a 
knowledge of just what it is that is happening, and just 
what the effects are. The life and energy of the nation 
may depend upon the functioning of this social force. 

When we come to the matter of retiring to town, we 
are dealing with a complex situation. We plainly do 
not know the full facts nor the full results for the United 
States as a whole. The problem here appears to be one 
of knowledge of the facts, knowledge of the stream of 
retreat, motives, movement of title and properties to town 
with the retiring farmer, the farmer’s willingness to go 
to town if he should have easy access to church, physi- 
cians, hospital, library, entertainment from his farm 
home. 

The other movements, because of pleasure, search for 
health, seasonal labor, flux of teachers and clergy, pre- 
sent first of all a problem of knowledge. It is a mere 
case of guessing to block out a series of problems, grave 
or minor, when nothing is actually known about these 
movements. This discussion leads up to the stone wall 
of ignorance. We need to know these great movements 
in detail. That is, we need the statistics of the move- 
ments; we need the economies of the movements; we need 


MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 195 


the social influences of the movements. Let us briefly 
face the problem. 


A Strupy oF THE Movements or PoPpuLATION 


Who could make a worthy study of movements to and 
from farms? The answer is, any great national agency 
with a sympathy for farm life and a sound national life: 
the Farm Bureau; a congressional commission; the De- 
partment of Agriculture; a research foundation; any 
state experiment station. 

How long would it take to compass such an investiga- 
tion? The reply is at random: one year for a mind to 
get thoroughly saturated with the situation and, by a 
nation-wide reconnaissance, to gain clues that might be 
followed; one year for a series of correspondence in- 
quiries covering the length and breadth of the land 
through the establishment of a list of fifty thousand co- 
operators; one year for representative field studies of 
an intensive character designed to test out the results ob- 
tained by correspondence; three years for assembling 
and publishing the results. 

What would be the final aim of the study? This is a 
hard question. But whatever else were aimed at, it 
should be to chart the streams, currents, tides of these 
movements for the United States. The navigator has his 
seas charted and mapped. He knows the constant cur- 
rents. He knows when to expect his incoming tide, and 
the outgoing one. He knows what happens when a storm 
period breaks. In some such fashion, the farmer, the 
merchant, the banker, the statesman, should come to 


196 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


know the constant forces that produce constant currents 
of persons moving here or there. They should know the 
routes and the causes. They should be able to forecast 
extraordinary movements. 

Such a detailed knowledge of the internal migrations 
of persons to and from farms will illuminate every social, 
economie, and political problem affecting agriculture and 
farm life. Theory will welcome revision on the basis of 
facts. 

This crude analysis of the movements of our farm 
population, and this plea for study, will at once suggest 
to the general economist, general sociologist, and general 
political scientist the value of a detailed graphic picture 
of the movements of the whole population of the United 
States. The presence of cities grading from the 
village to the metropolis, the fact that major cities and 
‘‘oreater city’’ areas have parts within parts, groups 
within groups, all suggest that the problem of movement 
from one grade to another, one group to another, one 
occupation to another, one residence area to another, 
contains, hidden in its labyrinthine complex, the key 
to understanding many of our national ills, and the key 
to national remedy. 


' CHAPTER XIV 


RURAL LIFE IN AMERICAN ART 


3. RT has not come to its maturity if it does not 

A put itself abreast with the most potent influ- 
-ences of the world.”’ 

So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson more than a genera- 

tion ago in his Essay on Art. And whether Emerson 

was right or wrong, American agriculture is looking to 


American art to take a place beside her as an ally. 


Tue Hort AGE 


The hoe age in agriculture, ancient as the reign of 
the hoe in the world has been, closed in America some 
decades ago. The hoe farmer may still be found here 
and there, but his day is done. In the era when the 
hoe was king, so tremendous was the bare task of turning 
the face of the earth over that this feat outweighed every 
other exploit in agriculture. No wonder the hoe was 
king. 

And no wonder that the pictorial and plastic arts 
the world over made the farmer the man with the hoe. 
The farmer thereafter is the man, hoe in hand, with 
bent back, striking a blow at the weakest point in the 
earth’s crust, pulling upward, loosening the earth’s grip 
upon a portion of the soil, lifting it for a moment, and 

197 


198 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


finally turning it face over. The momentary mechani- 
eal victory is repeated, clod by clod, yard by yard, hour 
after hour, day after day. 

When the hoe man has tamed the ox, marble and 
canvas show us the ox pulling the hoe, now ealled a 
plow, while the hoe man, still eying the earth, holds the 
plow-hoe in place and goads on the ox. With the hoe 
man is the hoe woman in the field. At the chiming eall 
to prayer, she ceases toil, bends her head, and thanks 
God for so much as a hoe. At harvest-time the hoe, 
now a sickle, slowly cuts down the standing grain, 
and the hoe woman gleans the straws and heads. There 
in the hoe age is the solitary shepherd with his herd of 
sheep ; there, the dairymaid with her milk-pail brimming. 
The hoe man and the hoe woman are on canvas, in mar- 
ble, in bronze, on mural interiors, in etching, in illus- 
tration, in ballad, in elegy, in novel, in drama. In rural 
art the hoe still rules, while in America, at least, the 
hoe age in agriculture has disappeared. 

What, let us inquire, is the psychology of a hoe art 
that is not abreast with agriculture itself? 

Nature, we must remember, marvelously envelopes 
agriculture. And the brilliance of nature sheds some 
radiance upon every rural scene, however unhappy and 
pitiful the plight of the people in the scene may be. In 
order, therefore, to appraise rightly the psychology of 
the hoe in art aside from the glamour of nature, we 
must take off, as it were, the shining garment of nature 
from the shoulders of the hoe man and look at the naked 
hoe in his hands. 

Looking intently on that part of the depiction, who 


RURAL LIFE IN AMERICAN ART 199 


that is versed in peasant life can get away from the 
sheer fact of toil in that hoe, back-bending, thigh- 
straining toil? Who can get away from the solitude of 
life in that hoe? Who ean get away from the crude 
contact with the rough, the staining, the painful, in that 
hoe? Who ean get away from the pathos, the suffering 
suppressed, the frustration of hope, in the hoe? The 
eotter’s hut goes with the hoe. The hoe means long days 
of labor. The hoe means woman at man’s work. The 
art of the hoe age depicts the hoe man as he is and hoe 
agriculture as it is. And with this concession to hoe 
art, let us pass on to inquire whether there is a successor 
to hoe art as there is a successor to the hoe man. 


Tor New Ruravu Lire AND A NEw RuRAL ArT 


A struggle in America, none the less titanic because 
not in the public eye, has been going on during the last 
fifty years to take the hoe out of farming, to dispossess 
its whole tribe; to take out the hoe hut and the hoe 
manner of living; to take out the hoe school, the hoe 
ehurch. 

In America the land-worker has slowly struggled to 
produce a machine to bear the dour brunt of labor; 
struggled to live like other men, surrounded by in- 
stitutions which should bring the world to his door- 
step, that is, bring to his very threshold the commodi- 
ties, skills, wisdoms, and riches which men desire with 
longing, just such desirable things as men who work in 
the most highly favored occupations have and hold dear; 
struggled to overcome the prejudice of publie opinion 
which has maintained, politely indeed but firmly, that 


200 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the farm cannot enrich the soul of a people, that a curse 
rests upon stillage, and that culture and civilization 
must be given up when one goes over the threshold of 
the farm-house. | 

Success has crowned the first type of struggle, and 
machine farming has displaced hoe farming. As the 
hoe man becomes extinct, the farm engineer is taking 
his place. The second type of struggle, to live like 
other men, is still keen. No one is wise enough to 
predict how this struggle will end. The third type of 
struggle is still more in doubt. America no longer pokes 
fun at the farmer, to be sure; but America has not yet 
heartily conceded that a good kind of life is possible 
onafarm. The eyes of city men and women still mirror 
the stigma of dirt, toil, ignorance, loneliness, branded 
into the honor of farming during the hoe age. 

We now come to the main question, how American art 
can come in as an ally of American farming and farm 
life. 

The first answer is this: Let American art put it- 
self abreast with this most potent occupation in America, 
abreast especially of the extraordinary advances in the 
occupation. Agricultural science has transformed farm- 
ing from a traditional craft to a creative process. The 
pure-bred kernel of wheat, the pure-bred ear of corn, 
the pure-bred type of hog, sheep, and cow, have come 
as near to being themselves fine-art products as it is 
possible for living automatons to be. The scientific skill 
in breeding, of which Luther Burbank is perhaps the 
most widely known exponent, though perhaps not the 
most important, is a species of art designing. The ad- 


RURAL LIFE IN AMERICAN ART 201 


justment of means to end attained in these pure-bred 
types is, to a philosophic mind, at least, an example of 
an idealistic achievement in a material and medium 
which, while not so gross as marble, bronze, or pigments, 
because living, is not so tractable, either. 

The truth is that the hoe was never the really sig- 
nificant thing about agriculture, even in the hoe age. 
The hoe made the overpowering impression, it is true, 
but neither the process nor the tool, neither the hoe nor 
the machine nor the soil, is the glory of agriculture. It 
is the living product. It is the living kernel of wheat, 
the living ear of corn, the boll of cotton, the orange, 
the apple, the Guernsey milch cow. The product is the 
farmer’s pride, however toilsome the toil may have been. 
It is his glory to see his achievement living before 
him. Forgetting the journeys over the fields, for- 
getting the labors, just to see and show his creation— 
this has lain in his mind through all the months of 
waiting. 

Here is the first opportunity of art, then; namely, to 
symbolize this wonderful created thing and to commemo- 
rate the moment of joy in the farmer’s life when, hav- 
ing made the corn and wheat to leap from the dead 
earth, he turns over to the world food to keep man go- 
ing. Once to seize the outstanding thing about present- 
day agriculture, once to discern the idealism in the 
high-bred product, will be for art to forswear the hoe 
and to turn to the spirit of life in agriculture. 

If the artist asks whether we wish a machine (alas, 
alas!) substituted in art for the hoe—a tractor for hoe, 
ox, and plow; a harvesting combine (reaper and 


202 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


thresher) for the sickle—we reply: ‘‘No. Decidedly 
no. Keep tiie machine out of the picture, as a symbol.’’ 
We in agriculture are not asking for poor art. We do 
not ask either for a poster or an advertisement of agri- 
culture. We ask for interpretation, for expression of 
the high emotion wrapped up in the agricultural occu- 
pation. Emotion, however, that is not all pathos. We 
want the glory, the exaltation, of the real achievement of 
the farmer depicted; cast squarely in the eye of the be- 
holder. Not the glory of the sunset over an irresistibly 
charming landscape, with the pitiful peasant posture 
thrown in by way of giving ‘‘human interest.’’ Why 
reserve pathos for the farmer, and express glory in 
the steed-riding warrior? 

Surely the materials of the plastic arts are not so 
meager that the sculptor must have his hoe or else give 
up his fountain. Has he not, as he always has had, the 
episode and the narrative in episodic form? Can he not 
marshal into this medium the products of agriculture, 
the heroes and heroines of farming in their relations to 
the nation without introducing the sweated tool? Was 
not America on its knees to the farmer a few years 
ago? Did not the generals and colonels of crop and 
animal production gird themselves to the great task? 
Did they not win the plaudits of warrior and statesman ? 
Cannot this obeisance of the élite to the intellectual 
achievement of the land-worker be set forth with his- 
toric emphasis? 

In Berlin there is a monument to a great German agri- 
culturist Thaer: a heroic figure surmounting the gran- 
ite; on the four faces of the granite block, in bas-relief, 


RURAL LIFE IN AMERICAN ART 2038 


four episodes in the life of Thaer: teaching the scientist, 
soldier, statesman, and farmer about sheep (Thaer was 
a great sheep man) ; overseeing the shearing of a flock 
of sheep; central figure in a harvest scene; receiving 
recognition from statesman, soldier, citizen. Thaer lived 
in the hoe age, be it remembered, at a time when Arthur 
Young in England was putting intellect into farming, 
when Washington in America was raising the standard 
of American agriculture. And yet the sculptor mini- 
mized the hoe and glorified the product. The impression 
conveyed is a profound new sense of the meaning of 
farming. 

This all-too-feeble advocacy of a new type of agricul- 
tural art will not persuade the artist to forswear the 
hoe, if he himself does not sense the glory in food- 
production and especially the triumphant character of 
the new growth-controlling agriculture. The first art- 
ist to feel the idea, to sense the truth, will solve the 
problem of relegating the tool to its place and bring- 
ing forward the central theme. We ask for a worthy 
symbol of agriculture to displace the hoe. We do not 
know what form it will take. But we trust the discern- 
ing artist’s mind to create the symbol. 

He who would prepare to put art abreast of modern 
agriculture must pay a long visit to one of the dynamic 
centers of agricultural science. He must live in the farm 
homes of those men and women who have seen the inner 
meaning of the new farming. He must reside in the 
farm communities that have become equipped with facili- 
ties for living well. He must come to know the new 
rural school-teacher, the new rural preacher, the new 


204 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


rural librarian, the new rural nurse, doctor, intern, the 
new rural legislator, until he is imbued with the new 
_ facts as realities and with the new hope of the new rural 
leaders. Such a preparation in study, no more tortuous 
and no more exacting than great artists of all ages 
have imposed upon themselves, will bring forth a great 
new type of art. But is there any demand for it? 
What of the market for rural art? 


THe MARKET FoR RurRAL ART 


As the college of agriculture is the intellectual center 
of the new agriculture in each State, so is it the po- 
tential center of American rural art. The college of 
agriculture is rapidly expanding. A building era is be- 
fore it. The campus already gives one the impression of 
a university. While many of its architectural require- 
ments are of the conventional type, there is perceptible 
a groping for an expression not found in the ordinary 
building. The subject-matter of the college curriculum 
is so materialistic that those who appreciate best the in- 
nate beauty of agriculture feel the need of an animating 
environment that shall lift the technic of the material- 
istic out of the commonplace and raise it to poetic value. 

These forty-eight colleges will demand henceforth not 
only an expressive architecture but an expressive new 
interior decorative art as well as an expressive exterior 
art. Neither can it long be overlooked that agriculture, 
both as art and science, is bringing forth great minds 
and personalities, such as men in all ages have delighted 
to honor and commemorate in an enduring way. Agri- 
cultural legislation already has its great men whom the 


RURAL LIFE IN AMERICAN ART 205 


States will soon think to honor in bronze. Shall the 
sculptor of the war-horse and of his heroic rider be 
called upon to do these pieces? God forbid. Give us 
rather the skill born of a new experience and a rapt 
appreciation. 

But you will ask whether there is any broad, demo- 
eratic demand for rural art. The answer is on the tip 
of the tongue. The thousands of rural schools in the 
United States have waited long with desire for these 
symbols of beautiful meaning which shape youth more 
than lessons. Educators are at their wits’ end to con- 
vey to farm boys and girls the magic of art. One little 
stroke from the artist’s hand is worth, at this point, a 
hundred lectures from the educator. The new art tried 
out and found true at the college is ready then for the 
rural school. 

One highway for rural art leading straight to the 
homes of farmers themselves is the agricultural press. 
At present the photograph is in the lime-light in all 
agricultural papers. And probably it is true that a 
good photograph is better in the agricultural press than 
a hackneyed piece of depressing hoe art, however justi- 
fiable the classic may have been in its own day and 
place. How welcome the new type of rural art would 
be to editor and reader, it takes little fancy to feel. 

Farmers are building rural community houses, great 
consolidated schools, great country churches. In the 
coming decade the number will be multiplied. Who will 
put the touch of beauty with meaning into these struc- 
tures? Who will invest them with the air of dignity, 
distinction, and worth? The more prosperous farmers 


206 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


who stay upon the land are, somewhat blindly it may 
be, trying to express their joy and abiding faith in 
agriculture and country life, in a type of country house, 
of farmstead, and landscape. Who will assist in this 
vast enterprise to make the country more expressive, 
more meaningful, more human and add to the beauty of 
nature’s majestic setting the beauty of man’s ideal and 
thought ? 

The American village, which, for at least another gen- 
eration as in the past, will be the center of many activi- 
ties of farmers, is as raw and crude as it is, not be- 
cause agriculture surrounds it, but because it bears the 
stigma of the hoe. The curse, such as it is, has been 
put upon it. Its blight is one of thinking—disdain, 
neglect, or condescension. It will take only a thought, 
a fine thought, a belief, a winsome belief, to change the 
American village. Whose role is it to believe the beau- 
tiful back into human nature? When art becomes an 
ally of agriculture, can it not, will it not, bring beauty 
and dignity into the small town and village? Then 
fountains will play on the green. Then civic centers 
will cluster around and beneath the elms. Then finer 
and finer ideas will find form in structure there. This 
means, however, cooperation of art with the best in 
agriculture and rural life. 

But there are American artists who, comparing the 
elose-fitting, tight-walled, tidy, and trim European vil- 
lage with our American village, say: ‘‘Give us the 
beautiful freedom of the American village. We love the 
negligée and abandon of its lines.’’ Our comment is 
this: In asking thoughtful men and women of the day 


RURAL LIFE IN AMERICAN ART 207 


to assist in adding to the American village and small 
town a touch of beauty, we are really asking that they 
shall gage the village according to a high value not now 
generally attached to it in the public mind. Those who 
praise the American village come out to it from the city, 
drive through it in a motor-car, remark how expansive 
the lawns are in contrast with the city, and drive away. 
They might thank God they did not have to live there or 
trade there. They think it is good enough, perchance, 
for those who do. But the people who live in the Amer- 
ican village or utilize it for commercial purposes deserve 
in their civie center a quality of architectural harmony 
of the same fine distinction which the city seeks. Because 
we prize the American village and small town for what 
they mean to villager and farmer, we ask that artists 
add some legacy of perfection to its broad-flowing lines. 


THE PRACTICAL SIDE OF THE RuRAL ART PROBLEM 


The problem of rural art after all comes back to a 
very practical question. What can be done? What 
are the steps toward bringing art abreast with the new 
agriculture and rural life? Where lies the entrance into 
art circles for the new rural idea, which in very truth 
has already energized rural education, rural religion, 
rural commerce, rural recreation, rural journalism? 
Several answers are ready. Let us glance at them. 

The schools of art are entrances into American art 
circles. Certainly it is possible for these schools to give 
chance for a voice to plead, even though it be at first 
an alien voice so far as art is concerned. This idea, 
once on the inside, fanned a little, only a little, will 


208 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


begin to appeal to young artists of rural sympathies. 
If one has imbibed life from the hoe alone, he may, it 
must be confessed, be under the spell of rural pessimism. 
Too many exiles from farm life to city industry have 
brought away only misery and disillusionment of life. 
But there are those who have felt the glory. Hope is 
in these souls. 

Could we not hope for a great Foundation for Rural 
Art? <A wise and wealthy patron of rural art arising 
now has no competitor. Scope is his. Religion has its 
wealthy patrons, but rural religion has none as yet. 
Health has its wealthy patrons, and rural health has not 
been overlooked by them. What a force for national 
life the American Foundation for Rural Art would 
prove! 

Could we not hope for a place for rural art in present- 
day exhibitions and competitions? This seems a 
legitimate hope. But such things do not just happen. 
Accident is outside this realm. Thinking on somebody’s 
part, to the point of being on fire with the idea, is the 
begetter of such action. It is by no means unreason- 
able to look forward to a national conference and ex- 
hibition of rural art. This way trod rural education, 
rural religion, rural recreation. There were the en- 
thusiasts, of course. There were the agitators. They 
were not always the eminent and stately. But their 
voice was at length heard. So may it be, so will it be, 
we may expect, in art. The tyranny of the traditional 
will be protested. And little by little the glory and 
beauty of a new rural art will come. 


CHAPTER XV 
THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 


Democracy REMELTED AND REMINTED 


EMOCRACY, like business, responds to the vi- 
1) talizing process of periodic review, criticism, 

reinterpretation, and recreation. The new day 
is bound to have its new democracy as well as its new 
merchandising methods, even though the old be simply 
remelted and reminted. We are proposing at this point 
that democracy, as we have known it for a generation or 
so, be placed again in the melting-pot, and that the farm 
population be fused into the mass and that when poured 
out: the mintage be coined into communities, each one 
possessing the qualities of a better democracy. 

Four general divisions of people, groups which have 
come down from antiquity, claim our attention in any 
discussion of democracy: first, a grouping by nativity; 
second, one by wealth; third, one by intelligence; fourth, 
one by occupation. Birth, ‘wealth, intelligence, and 
work divide people, each into several strata. Our con- 
cern just now is not that of democratizing the classes 
whose origin is in the varying degrees or conditions of 
birth, wealth, or intelligence. A democracy of those 


persons who differ widely in conditions of birth is the 
209 


210 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


special, well recognized task of the United States of 
America. A*democracy of those possessing varying de- 
grees of wealth—the multimillionaires, the wealthy, the 
well-to-do, the poor, the poverty-stricken—has been an 
age-old, never-ending problem. Fusing into democracy 
the different strata of the schooled, the uneducated, the 
intelligent, or the unintelligent is well recognized as an 
American objective. The public school in America has 
been one of the sure agents of democracy acting upon 
each one of these three groups. It is the fourth group 
and its democratization, however, which especially con- 
cerns us at this moment. Let us look at this division of 
people grouped by their occupation. 


Broap CLASSES OF OCCUPATIONS 


A broad division of occupations may be made into 
farming, industrial labor, personal service, merchandis- 
ing. Our task is to consider how to democratize the peo- 
ple engaged in these different occupations. The theory 
of occupation is based on specialization of industry and 
the special ability of the worker. You cannot do all 
of the work for your own needs, and so you take a tiny 
part of the work for every one and apply the energies of 
your special ability to it. In order to be fair in your 
opinion about other work and about other persons in 
other occupations, you should, to a greater or less degree, 
know the ins and outs of the work of other people. 
For this purpose nothing can take the place of first- 
hand econtact—laborer with farmer, farmer with mer- 
chandiser, merchandiser with laborer, and personal 
service agent with laborer, farmer, and tradesman. The 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 211 


next best sort of contact is that of the children of fami- 
lies of one occupation with the children of families of 
other occupations. 

In the eight grades of common school, either in city 
or open country, the make-up of the school is a matter 
of neighborhood. In village schools, on the other hand, 
the variety of occupations of the village will be a factor. 

It is the high school, however, that lends itself best 
to democratizing the children of various occupational 
groups. It overcomes the isolation and segregation of 
residence groups. The high-school period comes at the 
dawn of the social and idealistic consciousness of the 
child and hence is well calculated to absorb the varying 
points of view of different occupational complexes and to 
lay the groundwork for sympathy with the broad, com- 
mon aspects of all occupations. 

No one would deliberately advocate the segregation 
of the children of skilled industrial workers in a high. 
school, nor the children of merchandisers, nor the chil- 
dren of agents of personal service. What force could 
more quickly consolidate class consciousness, perpetuate 
class rancor, prepare for deeper conflict, than such a 
procedure ? 


IDEAL CONDITIONS FOR A DEMOCRACY OF OCCUPATIONS 


Granting that workers in different occupations will 
be separated more or less from one another, physically 
and mentally, while working during a third of the day, 
it is plain that there should be some channel left open 
by which they may return, each from his special pur- 
suit, each from contact with workers at the same task, 


212 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


to a level of common life and appreciation of the results 
of all phases of work, to contact with workers in differ- 
ent phases of work. How to do it? How to have such 
a channel? 

Residence together in neighborhoods is one means, so 
that the neighbor relation may furnish the common level. 

Churches together, whether residence provides a chan- 
nel or not, is a second answer. 

Interoccupational clubs or societies furnish a third. 
Chambers of commerce, established to bring together 
merchandisers, are now frequently found functioning as 
interoccupational clubs. 

Women’s clubs furnish a fourth. 

The municipality, containing within itself workers of 
a well rounded number of varieties of occupations, is 
perhaps on the whole the most far-reaching channel. 
Election of officers to direct and control broad common 
interests; institutions for common life; policies for de- 
velopment of the environing conditions of life; these 
severally bring all occupations together in thought and 
emotion, through conflict, no doubt, into unanimity of 
action. 


Worst PossIBLE CONDITIONS FOR DEMOCRACY 


The worst possible conditions for democracy unques- 
tionably would be to perpetuate and intrench a situa- 
tion of wide-spread segregation of classes of workers, in 
which occupational workers would be segregated into res- 
idence districts, so that neighbors would be practically of 
the same occupation ; churches would be segregated, each 
containing a congregation of a single occupation; schools 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 213 


would be segregated, each containing children from 
homes of workers of one class; all clubs and associa- 
tions would be special and occupational, with no chance 
for interoccupational groups; municipalities would be 
composed of one occupation alone. Occupation is so ab- 
sorbing an interest that when one occupation is isolated 
so completely as we have indicated there is created a 
virtually separate race of beings, with all the armored 
equipment of race and race rancor for defense and, of- 
fense. The possible antagonisms are presumably multi- 
plied many times. In so far, moreover, as any one of 
the foregoing isolations is a fact, in so far democracy is 
made more difficult. If, furthermore, it should happen 
that any one great occupational group is isolated in 
all of these respects and its social life developed under 
a condition of general segregation, the democracy of 
that group is losing much, while national life becomes 
more difficult on this account. 


FARMERS Have No Community MUNICIPALITY 


The situation outlined above as the worst possible is, 
broadly speaking, the farmer situation in America. 
Farmers are grouped together in farm neighborhoods by 
residence; their churches, schools, clubs, associations, 
are farmer groups, by and large; except in portions of 
New England where the prevailing municipality is the 
‘‘town,’’ the farmers of the United States have no ef- 
fective local municipalities. In other words, the farmer 
is shut out of the democratic municipal village and 
city and left stranded in the open country by himself, 
without any community municipal apparatus. The ef- 


214 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


fect upon democracy is evident. Especially is this ef- 
fect important, seeing that the farm population is the 
largest group of a single occupation in our total popula- 
tion. The occasional inheritance of sullen resentment 
is due to this situation. Many of the economic agri- 
cultural troubles are doubtless due to this faulty expres- 
sion of democracy giving rise to misunderstandings be- 
tween city man and country man. 

Justice to the farm population as a whole will prompt 
America some day to remedy this situation. Farm peo- 
ple will be enabled to associate in closer touch with 
other workers. The institutions of farmers, so far as 
possible, will be conducted jointly with other classes. 
The equal opportunity of the farmer to a just share 
in the national social dividend can be brought about only 
by restoring him to a real place in democracy. But 
this is a matter far easier to state than to accomplish. 

The local government of the farm people of the United 
States will be almost the last subject for serious-minded 
reconstruction. The frontier will hang on to the farm- 
er’s political coat-tails long after it has been severed 
from his school, trade, and recreation. Of course the 
frontier will stick closer than a brother to every form 
of rural organization; but to the farmer’s precious town- 
ship and county the frontier will cling with a grip 
which only a life-and-death struggle will loosen. And 
yet in spite of this tenacity and struggle, the frontier 
must be cut clean away. For the farmer is entitled to 
live a modern life with other modern men, unhampered 
by remnants of a bygone and outlived age. 

This slowness with which the farmer is becoming ad- 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 215 


justed politically is undoubtedly holding him back eco- 
nomically. The log that gets caught between the rocks 
stops the next log and the next, and a log jam delays the 
whole log run. The farmer’s local municipality has 
jammed the whole country life movement and is holding 
it up. It is the aim of this discussion to set forth the 
rural municipal problem in broad terms so that it will 
be seen as a factor in every other important rural 
social and economie problem. Let us glance at the part 
a municipality plays in the life of a group of people. 


Tuer ROLE or A MUNICIPALITY 


The genius of a municipality is its equipment of legal 
powers and natural environing circumstances for effica- 
cious home rule. People have always craved home rule. 
In certain matters, especially, home rule is not only 
desired by the people directly concerned but is con- 
sidered desirable by other people who are indirectly con- 
cerned. A municipality is established by law and set 
going, like a machine. It is a kind of semiautomatic 
social machine, which in the experience and wisdom of 
men seems best adapted for achieving certain public 
purposes. It is a single quite complicated machine, usu- 
ally contrived to take care of a great number of very 
diverse projects. It is considered better to have one 
municipality, one machine, to take care of all the local 
public functions ranging from the matter of streets clear 
through to that of municipal golf grounds, than to have 
fifty separate and distinct municipalities, fifty machines, 
each with a single function, and all related more or less 
to the same group of people. Experience has demon- 


216 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


strated the ability of a group of people ranging from 
one thousand persons up to five thousand, organized 
as a municipality, to function adequately in local govy- 
ernment and home rule in regard to these diverse activi- 
ties. No substitute has ever been seriously brought 
forward for this municipality. A group of people, hav- 
ing geographic unity, with similar interests, incorporated 
by legislative enactment, given privileges and powers of 
home rule according to the size and needs of the group, 
is the best that civilization can yet offer as a local 
political unit. There are grades of municipalities de- 
pending upon the size of the group and so upon the re- 
quirements of the group. 

The best example of municipality, very likely, is the 
city. It is not necessary here to describe the city in 
detail. Its compact business and residence character 
lends itself very naturally to grouping, especially when 
taken in connection with the fact that city groups are 
usually separated from one another by considerable dis- 
tances and so have a distinctness that marks each as a 
unit. It is not difficult to persuade this city group of 
its common interest in the diverse details of municipal 
government. So long as the city of one hundred thou- 
sand persons looks after the common institutional in- 
terests of all the homes up to the point, but not beyond 
it, where people can effectively codperate, and so long as 
a city of one thousand people does not attempt the func- 
tions that it would require the resources of five thousand 
people to maintain, then home rule by cities of different 
grades and populations ean nicely adjust itself to the 
purse and public needs of the citizens. 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 217 


Adjustment to conditions of growth and expansion is 
always possible in cities under their charters. New 
charters are available when cities outgrow their grade. 
A city is never in doubt about the reach of its school 
system. It is coterminous with its incorporated area. 
Its high-school district covers the whole city. The city 
is responsible for the health and opportunity for play of 
all persons within its area. Its trading institutions are 
part and parcel of the city. There is no question about 
the responsibility of trade agencies for service to citi- 
zens. The unity, compactness, and distinct, unambigu- 
ous character of the city make it an exceptionally fine 
type of municipality. With the city in mind as a 
municipal machine with the outlines of effectiveness, 
whatever may be true of the imperfect character of 
the personnel in power, let us take a look at the rural 
municipalities of the present day. 


PRESENT RuRAL MUNICIPALITIES 


Barring the agricultural village of Utah and some 
similar agricultural villages in New England, it is vain 
to look for or expect in the future to find compact 
groups of farmsteads and farm homes comparable with 
the unity and compactness of cities. The American 
farm population is scattered; probably it will always 
remain scattered. Its lack of compactness and its dis- 
unity will always handicap it. The problem of mod- 
ernizing the municipality of the farmer will be one that 
will have to cope directly and vigorously with this char- 
acteristic of American farming. Those who engineer 


218 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


the job must decline to lie down before it in despair or 
resignation. . 

The farmer in frontier days acquiesced in having his 
public common interests taken care of by makeshifts. 
He could have no city; so the possibility of having a 
single municipality for all local needs seemed for the 
time being impracticable. He early learned to rely 
upon different municipalities. For schools he had a 
school district. This is a municipality with a single 
function, viz., maintaining a public school. For roads 
he had a road district, virtually a municipality with a 
single function, viz., maintaining highways. Latterly he 
has come to have a drainage district, a municipality for 
digging and maintaining a drainage ditch. The 
farmer also had the township, sometimes with no 
partner. This was a municipality having functions re- 
lated to highways, schools, and police. Then as a last 
resort the farmer had some local functions performed 
by the county. As any type of farmer’s municipality 
proved weak or ineffective, the tendency came about for 
the county to take over its functions. The county 
municipality was a partnership with several other munic- 
ipalities—villages, townships, cities—which might be 
within its borders. 

In New England the town was from early days a 
partnership of farmer and villager or city man. As a 
municipal machine it gave its benefits to farmer and 
city man alike. At first the town with its town hall 
or common meeting-place had something of the same 
unity and compact character possessed by the city. 
Usually there was a village core and a farming fringe. 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 219 


As population grew, however, many New England towns 
came to have more than one trading place or core, each 
core having its fringe. For historical reasons the origi- 
nal core and town hall kept serving. The town organiza- 
tion was maintained through adjustment and adaptation 
even though its core came to be of large-city size. It 
appears, therefore, that the New England town lacks the 
unity of the city in much the same way as the county, 
even though it is much smaller than the county. 


MALADJUSTMENTS IN PRESENT RuRAL LOCAL 
GOVERNMENT 


While the city has forged ahead with modern institu- 
tions and kept fairly modernized step by step and stage 
by stage because it could deal with the wants of a com- 
pact group, the farmer has found it exceedingly difficult, 
by utilizing the crude municipalities which were created 
for a single purpose or a few purposes adapted to an 
outlived age, to modernize his institutions. For ex- 
ample, the school district was made for a frontier school. 
It was neither large enough nor wealthy enough to 
maintain a modern school. This district could not mod- 
ernize its function. The township also was too small, 
with too few people in it, to modernize its highways. It 
must, if it was to do anything modern with its roads, 
simply fall in line with greater governing areas, such 
as county or State. The county meantime was in part- 
nership with cities and towns and villages and could 
not give itself thoroughly to developing the local in- 
stitutions that the farmers needed. 

In the presence of so many divisions of function and 


220 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


so many obstacles, it is no wonder the farmer was be- 
lated and délayed in modernizing his public local in- 
stitutions. And yet, in spite of these difficulties, the 
record of his endeavor is interesting. The record is 
mainly one of modernization of his schools. Finding 
that his school district was too small, too poor, he looked 
about to see how he could remedy the trouble. He hit 
upon the scheme of ‘‘consolidation,’’ simply adding dis- 
trict to district until there was an area large enough, 
wealthy enough, to support a modern school. The story 
of ‘‘consolidation of school districts’’ is a story roman- 
tic, adventurous, long, in building a new farmer’s munic- . 
ipality. The state law had to be changed. This was 
very hard to effect, and met with the opposition of all 
traditionalists. Even when the law finally gave permis- 
sion, then the process of gaining the free will of the par- 
ticular people concerned was long drawn out. The 
farmer’s task of putting himself legally into a position 
to take advantage of progress in education and to have 
a modern school has been as arduous apparently as it 
would have been to carve out a single municipality for 
himself which, like the city, might have functioned for 
all his common public needs. 

When the farmers of Wisconsin wanted to have com- 
munity houses, they had to get a law enacted that en- 
abled them to create a community-house municipality. 
When North Carolina realized how inadequate was its 
form of local government for farmers, it passed a law 
making it possible for certain groups of farmers to estab- 
lish a rural municipality. The American farmer has 
not been idle in regard to his maladjustments. He has 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 221 


squirmed around some of his difficulties. He has made 
the county do things unheard of in the olden days. This 
shows that the farmer may be relied upon to put his 
hand to the plow and to turn his furrows until he has 
a real harvest of modern institutions. 


A. ProposEeD ALLIANCE OF CITY AND F'ARM 


In the county, and in the townships of some States, 
city and farm have long codperated in government. 
Many of the activities of this government approach close 
to local municipal government in type. It is not a new 
proposal, therefore, that city and farm form a municipal 
alliance. The new idea is to make the alliance a sub- 
stitute for the present collection of municipal func- 
tions possessed by the farmer. Let us briefly look at an 
ideal case for alliance, and this may indicate what could 
be done in circumstances less ideal. 

If there were a consolidation of rural trade centers, 
so that in place of several thousand incomplete hamlets 
and villages the American farm people had five thousand 
complete trading cities ranging from thirty-five hundred 
to ten thousand in population, then the farmer would 
have a start toward an ideal municipality. Like the 
original New England town, each such municipality 
would have a city core. There would be five thousand 
rural-urban municipalities. The natural farm trade 
basin of each small city would be included with its 
trading city in a cooperating municipality. The muni- 
cipal boundary lines would be as irregular as the 
boundaries of city municipalities now, all depending 
upon the lay of the land and the accessibility of farm- 


222 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


ers to this city in comparison with an adjoining city. 
On the average, six thousand farm people would be at- 
tached to eath municipality. Their farm lands would 
lie within it, as the farms of New England lie within the 
New England town. 

The farmers trade with these particular city people, 
anyway. The farmer’s banks are in the city, with his 
railway, his freight office. Virtually all his dealings of 
buying and selling are here. These tradesmen he is ac- 
quainted with. These people are his people. What 
more natural than that he should carry on with them 
political affairs as he does already with economic af- 
fairs? Let us look at a rough plan of such a cooperative 
municipality. 


PLAN OF A COOPERATIVE MUNICIPALITY 


The first step in the creation of a municipality to be 
composed of a small-city core and a farming fringe is to 
get the bounding lines. This has no theoretical diffi- 
culty, though it may be attended with the customary 
practical difficulties of fixing new boundaries to cities 
as expansion becomes necessary. The theory is to in- 
clude all the farms of those farmers regularly trading 
at this city. To these farmers the city is already theirs 
in a commercial sense. Their post-office is here. An 
analysis will show that these particular farm homes and 
these particular trading agencies are more closely inter- 
twined, already than any one would suspect. Linking 
them together politically is a step that completes and en- 
riches their economic and social relations. The new 
municipality, the new rural-urban city, will have an 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 223 


area of perhaps 225 square miles, that is, a radius of 
seven and one half miles. A map of this new munici- 
pality would look very much like a small irregular 
county that has only one trade center, namely, the 
county-seat. 

The next feature in the plan is perhaps the most 
novel and experimental. New England has proved in 
its town government that farmers and city people can 
keep political house together and do one another justice; 
so it appears that this element of cooperation is not the 
novel or probational element. The novel proposal is to 
zone the new municipality into three zones. The zones 
would need to be laid out with great care. Here is 
another boundary problem, with the usual attending 
clashes of interest, desire, greed, but an engineering 
problem perfectly capable of solution. The zones would 
not, of course, have the regularity of circles or circular 
lines; but roughly, for purposes of description, they 
may be thought of as bounded by circular lines. Zone 
No. 1 would be the bulk of the original city, especially 
all the well developed, paved, sewered, sidewalked por- 
tion that may be thought of as the whole circle lying at 
the heart of the area. This zone, for convenience, may 
be considered as having a radius of one mile, that is, a 
diameter of two miles. Zone No. 2 would be a belt lying 
between the outer boundary of Zone No. 1 and a circular 
line drawn from the same center as Zone No. 1 having 
for a radius, let us say, three miles. Zone No. 2 would 
then be a belt two miles wide just outside the city core. 
The third and remaining zone would be the rest of the 
municipal area, a belt four and a half miles wide lying 


224 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


between the outer boundary of Zone No. 2 and the 
boundary of the whole municipality. The object of the 
zones and thé nature of each zone and the relations to 
one another ean be only roughly indicated. 

First, the object of the zones. The people in the 
whole municipal area have undoubted great interests in 
common, which can reach perfect satisfaction only in 
common united institutions and activities. At the 
same time, there are some common interests of the people 
of the city core which the people in Zones 2 and 3 do 
not have. Likewise the people of Zone 2 very likely are 
so situated that they have some common interests not 
shared with Zone 3. This matter of zones is somewhat 
different from the well known divisions of cities into 
wards, although there are similarities. The new mu- 
nicipality would have, it is presumed, its wards, also. 
Let us resort to illustration to make clearer the object of 
creating three zones. 

The street paving, water system, sewerage system, re- 
late evidently to the city core, not to Zone 3 at all, and 
possibly not to Zone 2. The school system, however, 
would relate to all zones in its administration, and would 
be headed by a central high school. The property in 
the three zones would be subject to tax for only such 
purposes as the zones individually shared fully. The 
adjustment of taxation to the degree of codperation and 
sharing would be a delicate but by no means impossible 
problem. Such problems in taxation are common in all 
oyades of state and federal government. 

Zone No. 2 would be the zone into which Zone No. 1 
would be pushing. Occasional rezoning would be neces- 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 225 


sary in a growing municipality, as a matter of course. 
But there is no novelty in readjustment to city growth. 
The merging of wards, the division of wards, the ad- 
dition of new wards, are commonplaces. City engineer- 
ing is coping with this problem continually. 

As the plan got headway and the benefits began to ac- 
erue to city trade and to the farmer’s institutional life, 
the difference between the zones would not appear so 
great as at first. For example, the city core, Zone No. 1, 
would see the strategy of a system of modern highways 
linking every farm family to the trade center. There 
would be less discussion than one is inclined at first to 
think about including the highways in the total budget 
wherein each zone is to share. Moreover, the basic 
matter of a complete highway system economically en- 
gineered having been established, then the up-keep of the 
fire department, which is looked upon as a compacted 
city facility, will appeal to Zones 2 and 3. A run of five 
miles for a fire crew is a common thing in large cities 
now. Such a run on good country roads would also 
become commonplace. 

Such a type of municipality, once come to be the type 
of local unit in a State, would of course do away with 
townships (except for land description purposes) and 
probably with counties, also. The State would step in 
and function in matters where home rule was imprac- 
ticable in these municipalities. 

If the present city, large or small, objects that incor- 
porating the farmer and his farm into some municipal 
alliance with itself will give no end of trouble, will slow 
down their progress, and will take the edge off their 


226 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


methods of political procedure, then cities must propose 
an alternative solution that will give the farm population 
the municipal machinery for progress; or else the city 
must pay the constant penalty of its political segrega- 
tion in the presence of a restless ‘‘farm bloc’’ ever in a 
turmoil for satisfaction and freedom from discrimina- 
tion. Absorb the farm in the city; make the farmer 
a part of your municipal citizenship, as you do the con- 
tractor and his men, as you do the mill owner and his 
men: then the farmer will certainly not array himself 
against the city. 

If the farmer objects to alining himself with the city 
politically, it may be pointed out that he must live close 
to this city anyway; that he helps make the bank and 
banker, the store and merchant; and he might as well 
vet some of the political dividends of their farm-made 
energy, property, and leadership. Instead of fighting 
the city at arm’s length, why not go in with it and share 
in its progress? This is modern life, and a modernized 
farmer is very little different from a modernized banker. 

The American farmer’s economic problem, which 
everybody now concedes to be serious, is complicated by 
his municipal handicap. It may seem a long way round 
to getting a better price for his crops, to go in partner- 
ship with the city politically; but it has to be said that 
in this way hes remedy. Politics ean spoil the economies 
of a class, if it sets about it, and good polities can cure 
many an economic ill. The assumption that the farm- 
er’s present local political hamstrung situation is un- 
changeable and must go on, because put into play dur- 
ing the frontier era, is common; but the philosophy of 


THE COMING RURAL MUNICIPALITY 227 


it is medieval. The assumption can be challenged until 
it is no longer in good standing. And hither lies the 
way of the thinker. The proposed plan amounts only 
to a graphic challenge to think the problem out. 


CHAPTER XVI 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 


OPE is ‘‘Vitamine No. 1”’ in service. Without 
H hope in the heart of the man or woman who 

serves, ministration mysteriously fails to min- 
ister. Twelve thousand highly trained specialists in 
various phases of agriculture and country life are em- 
ployed by colleges of agriculture and by the United 
States Department of Agriculture to advance the science 
of agriculture in America and to reinforce at every 
point the farming industry. Literally hundreds of thou- 
sands of teachers also are training rural school children. 
Thousands and thousands of country ministers are 
‘‘breaking the bread of life’’ to farm people. Thou- 
sands of editors are making their mark on the minds of 
farmer folk. And many, many other servants of civil- 
ization are ministering to the comfort and well-being 
of these thirty millions of people. 

Do these persons as they labor entertain hope for 
agriculture and rural life? Do they believe with the 
heart as they work with the head that farming is good, 
and that life on the farm is essentially satisfying for 
man, woman, and child? Do they cherish the idea that 
their labors will help bring better conditions where 
conditions are now bad? If hope is theirs, is it intel- 


ligently based, based on a well considered set of facts? 
228 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 229 


Can their hope endure reverses; can it withstand the 
shock of sad, degenerate human sights, plans gone 
wrong, ingratitude for love’s labor? Rural hope, the 
vitality-breeding kind, or rural optimism, if you wish to 
call it so, has its sources. It comes, when it comes, be- 
cause of something real and tangible. When hope de- 
parts from the heart for a time, especially when due to 
a low ebb in the life of the ministering agent, there are 
devices by which hope may be coaxed back. It is a real 
problem of country life, how the trained leaders and 
skilled ministrants of rural science and culture are to 
maintain a hopeful, cheerful poise in the transition from 
frontierism to modern life. If despair over the low 
estate of the farm communities in America, measured by 
brutalizing averages of crude statistics, filters into the 
mind of rural teacher, preacher, county agent, agricul- 
tural professor, government scientist, and becomes there 
an obsession, it would be better for rural advancement 
if the worker were to give up his task and go to the 
city culture and occupation. Only hope held in a heart 
of grace can help bring on the coming of the new day. 


SourcEes oF Horse In OngE’s FAmiuy History 


If a person has come of a farmer strain, he has ex- 
perience of an intimate character that should go into the 
making of so delicate a human sentiment as belief in the 
future of farm people. The writer feels at a loss at this 
point to convey what lies in his heart and mind; and, 
much as he would prefer some other way, he feels driven 
to the necessity of relating his own personal experience. 
He hopes, therefore, pardon will be granted him by the 


230 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


reader for employing in this chapter the first person and 
for so freely, opening the door of his life upon many 
very personal experiences and private judgments. 

I have known all my life that, look into whatever 
branch of family history I might, my forebears for eight 
generations in America were farmers or farm bred. My 
earliest personal remembrances attach themselves to the 
farms of my four grandparents and of my several uncles 
in Delaware, New York, Michigan, and Virginia. All 
the bedtime stories told me in childhood had their set- 
tings in farm communities of Ohio and Virginia. 
Though the son of a country minister, and therefore 
much accustomed in early boyhood to the precincts of 
churches (including the horse-sheds), I was a constant 
visitor for long stretches at a time to the farms of my 
relatives. You can see how I took for granted that the 
farmer was as good as anybody. The best people I knew 
were farmers. The best places I frequented were farms. 
It never entered my head that I had to apologize for my 
grandfather’s business. This sentiment of the honor- 
able character of farming and its high place in the 
nation has, I must confess, never in my life missed a 
beat of my heart. Though charged with exacting church 
duties, my father thought he could not properly raise 
his family of four boys without a farm for them to live 
on and work with. He therefore bought and operated 
a farm of ninety acres where we boys breathed, roamed, 
sweat, and played during early adolescence. 

In my grandfather Look I saw the hoe farmer. I 
saw his psychology. But I saw the hoe farmer in him 
quietly change as his children, grown to manhood and 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 231 


womanhood, came to know the world a bit and brought it 
home to the farm cottage under the chestnut-trees. He 
was deacon in the country church. As I remember him 
now, dressed in his trim black suit brushed off to the 
last fleck of horsehair, boots polished like a mirror on 
Saturday night, mind you, tall silk hat carefully 
smoothed with a silk handkerchief, I know that dirt and 
farming are not inseparable. Cleanliness was next to 
godliness in very truth with my grandfather, and he 
was an ordinary farmer from Martha’s Vineyard, 
Massachusetts. 

I saw a great deal of my two grandmothers, for they 
lived to be ninety-two and ninety-five years old respec- 
tively and during the last ten years of life lived in my 
father’s household. I had seen them in their own farm 
kitchens, among their farm neighbors, in the affairs of 
the church. Then I saw them gravely age. I saw their 
bodies weaken but their spirit stay strong. I heard them 
rehearse their experiences; I came to know their abiding 
ideals and saw their contentment with their lot. Can 
any one suppose that I would be ‘‘making believe,’’ as 
children do and as politicians sometimes do, about the 
essential honor and glory of farming and farm life, when 
I have grown up in the sacred presence of those who have 
lived the life and loved it through and through? Do I 
not know that it is possible to live worthily and glori- 
ously on American farms in these days when I have 
seen how it was done a few decades ago? 

In my father’s parishes I came to know a great many 
farm boys and girls. The little one-room school gave 
me my early schooling. The country parson’s boy had 


232 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


to take pot-luck in education with the boys of the 
parish. The two-mile walk to school with dinner-pail 
swinging is a never-to-be-forgotten piece of living. 
Irish Catholic boys and girls and Protestant boys and 
girls fought over the old feuds of the centuries there in 
the little school. All the best of little pioneer schools, 
and all the worst, I am bound to believe, were in this 
school. Do I not know how those schoolmates of 
mine grew up, some to farm it there in the parish, some 
to go to the big city twelve miles off the hills down in the 
valley? Have I not followed their achievements? 
Knowing by heart the childhood of farmers, knowing 
the strong stuff, physical and mental, in the folk group 
at school, knowing the frailty of the little school, if I 
have hope now, is it not a tried and tested hope? 

Did I not many a time visit the farms of my father’s 
parishioners? Deacon Fish, an excellent farmer, driv- 
ing fat, sleek, clean-looking horses. A farm produc- 
tive but a farm beautiful; for Deacon Fish, though an 
exacting character where a matter of truth and right was 
concerned, was humane, gentle in soul, imaginative, a 
man to whom harmony in all things had the force of a 
commandment. And Deacon Wright, a hustling driv- 
ing man at work, but deeply read, intelligently inform- 
ing himself on matters of politics, history, culture. 
Generous to his minister. Did I not see these two dea- 
cons carry the little country church on their backs dur- 
ing their prime? Did I not see them weaken at the 
plow, as years grew upon them; and finally did I not see 
them leave the farms and farming to their sons; retire 
to the great city and take up again in city churches the 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 233 


spiritual burdens? I know why they left the bleak 
church up in the hills. But do I not know that a new 
day can come to the hills, when sturdy churchmen need 
not go to the big city to top off their careers? 

Many arural leader has similar family sources of hope 
for country life. Discernment in one’s personal ex- 
perience with farm people will reinforce one’s long- 
time optimism. What a loss to any man or woman who, 
trying to bring in the new farm day, never has had his 
early life intertwined with that of rural people! The 
only compensation possible is to embrace every oppor- 
tunity to come to intimate enough terms with farm peo- 
ple, so that they behave in his presence with the naiveté 
that characterizes their demeanor with children. Only 
much personal acquaintance with individuals can give 
the sureness of a well based hope. 


Sources oF Hoprk Founp IN CoMMUNITY LIFE 


It fell to my fortunate lot, after graduating from col- 
lege, to be asked to visit an academy situated in the 
country six miles from a railway, as a possible teacher 
of the physical sciences. I remember well my first eve- 
ning. The country stage had brought me to the little 
inn near the academy. After supper I went to my room, 
expecting to go to bed early and so appear at my best 
next morning when I was to meet the school board. 
Soon a knock came to the door, and a young man en- 
tered, or rather bounded in, saying: 

‘You ’re going to be the new teacher, aren’t you?’’ 


Replying, I said, ‘‘I hope I ’ll suit the school-board 
well enough.’’ 


234 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


Thereupon the young fellow almost shouted in a 
mysterious enthusiasm that I was not prepared to share: 
‘¢Well, we want you to pitch on our nine. We ’re going 
to have a baseball tournament here, and we ’ve heard 
that you pitch a curve that comes on like a corkscrew.’’ 

I denied the ‘‘corkscrew’’ but admitted that I was 
the college pitcher. Then the youth sidled up and half 
whispered: 

‘“When you meet the school-board, don’t, for heaven’s 
sake, tell them you play ball. My dad is president of 
the board. He is a farmer, you know, and has no use 
for baseball. I ’m an Amherst man myself, graduated 
last year, and we are trying to put up a stiff game here 
at the tournament. Say, I forgot; there is one man on 
the school-board, Doe Frame, who likes to see a good 
game of ball. Better tell him on the side that you play 
on the college team. It might prove a winner with 
him.’’ 

So I became a teacher in a real farmers’ academy, 
and incidentally a member for years of the community 
baseball team. 

Here I found a school of high-school grade already in 
its sixtieth year, serving nearly one thousand farm 
homes and the few hamlets scattered in among the 
farms. It was to all effects and purposes a folk school 
with a spirit almost identical with the famous folk 
schools of Denmark. It was a people’s school, a school 
of, for, and by the common people, who in the great 
majority of cases were ordinary dirt farmers, whether 
owners or tenants. The school-board was made up of 
thirty members, all resident farmers with the exception 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 235 


of one or two country storekeepers, two country doctors, 
and a country undertaker. An endowment provided 
funds which, together with tuition from the students 
who were able to pay, maintained the school. It was 
my good fortune to live in this community and teach the 
farm boys and girls for thirteen years. For ten of the 
years I was the principal. Let me convey to you the 
genius of this school of this community of a thousand 
farms. 

First, its founding. In 1808 the country got its first 
settler. It was a forest tract. Log houses were the 
first houses and served, some of them at least, almost to 
my day. When these pioneers were still clearing, still 
putting up their log houses, a country minister, Joshua 
Bradley by name, came among them. He soon began to 
preach education with all the vigor of ‘‘hell-fire.’’ He 
went from home to home over several townships and 
sald: 

‘*You must have a school higher than the common 
school. You must. You must. Your children will call 
you blessed one day if you give them such a school. 
Moreover, such a school will help save your community.’’ 

These plain farm men and women from Vermont, 
Massachusetts, and Connecticut listened to Joshua Brad- 
ley. One gave land, many gave work, and all gave 
money; and a stone building arose dedicated to truth 
and higher learning. In this building for sixty years 
had always stood some college-trained man with a corps 
of college men and women bringing the torch of knowl- 
edge from the world of letters and life. They stood in 
the community among these thousand farms as ambas- 


236 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


sadors of light and culture. Here I took my place in 
my turn, following in the steps of men I came to love 
and revere simply from what I saw of their influence 
upon the people. 

I found that no boy or girl could be so poor as not to 
have the advantages of the Academy, if the boy had 
promise and a will to learn, if the girl showed interest 
and ability. Let me show you how this would work out. 
It would be the monthly board meeting night. They met 
in Memorial Hall, a room hung round in my day with 
the large portraits in oil of old farmer worthies, pres- 
idents of the board in other days, old principals. I 
would make my report on the conditions, needs, outlook. 

I would say, ‘‘There is a bright boy over in Lorraine 
who would come to school next quarter if he had some 
help on his tuition.’’ 

William Mather, farmer, living two miles and a half 
out, would speak up quietly: ‘‘Put me down for this 
boy’s tuition. I knew his father when he was a young 
man. If the boy ’s like his father, he is all right.’’ 

J. J. Mather, farmer, three miles out, would remark: 
‘‘There is a nice girl in the Mixer District who ought to 
be in school here. Her father is a tenant with a large 
family of young children. I ’ll give ten dollars toward 
her tuition.’’ 

John Carpenter, ‘undertaker, would speak up: 
‘‘Five dollars for the girl. If J. J. says she’s all right, 
then she is.”’ 

Name after name would come up, be briefly discussed, 
and then taken care of personally by these great-hearted 
farmers. Do you think that I could be in that com- 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 237 


pany of ordinary dirt farmers for ten years, and see 
this thing unfailingly happen, and not come out with an 
ingrained belief that American farmers have it in them 
to uphold the best ideals of education? How many dis- 
appointments suffered by me in other communities will 
it take to eradicate the hope in what I have seen with my 
own eyes? 

Meet a few of these dirt farmers. Let me present 
Norris Shepardson. You will not understand this man 
at all if you think farmers are money-grubbers, material- 
ists, and ‘‘out for the profit’’ only; for Norris Shepard- 
son was always giving something away. Yes, little 
things, as you suspect, the Santa Claus variety of needed 
little things or very symbolic little things. He conveyed 
his love in the unobtrusive gift left without a name. 
The nameless basket of grapes, the bag of apples, the 
strange bouquet, the bag of flour left without a trace— 
these came to be known as coming from Norris Shepard- 
son. But he could give other things. There was his 
large timber lot. He gave it into the care of the Acad- 
emy for the community, on condition that ‘‘no live tree 
be cut down in it for a hundred years.’’ When his will 
was read it was found that most of his farm went into 
the endowment fund of the Academy. 

Let me present Deacon Heald, a farmer living three 
miles out. Many a time I have heard the deacon say, 
*‘T am running my farm for Christ.’? Walking down 
the street with you, the deacon, stepping along with a 
decided hitch, because one leg was so bent up at the 
knee that it was considerably shortened, might burst 
out of a reverie with this: ‘‘Well, there is really only 


238 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


one great problem in the world: is there a God? If 
there is, then everything else will be solved. And, you 
know, I beiieve there is a God.”’ 

This belief probably accounted for an action strange 
even to those farmers who knew him well. When 
pledges were being taken for the endowment fund at 
one commencement season, Deacon Heald arose and 
sald: 

‘‘My farm is worth six thousand dollars. I will give 
one thousand dollars of this farm to the endowment.’’ 

He put a mortgage on the farm and gave the thousand 
dollars to the fund. This belief of Farmer Heald’s in 
higher education will go a long way to sustain a belief 
in the American farmer’s ultimate adoption of the edu- 
eational ideal. 

Now to present William Mather, a descendant of the 
New England Mather family. His likeness to General 
U. S. Grant in looks was remarked by every one. He 
was a hard working, sturdy farmer of a level-headed, 
thrifty type, a lover of a great lecture on a sweeping 
historical theme, a good listener to a really great 
preacher, a very poor listener to a poor preacher. Then 
he could n’t keep awake until he got to sleep. He was 
a man intelligent enough to know what he had missed in 
life by being so tremendous a worker himself in the 
fields and with his herds. As his strength was finally 
failing he called me over to the farm one day and said: 
‘‘T am weary. I have worked too hard. My days are 
numbered. When I am gone I want you to tell my 
boy my great wish for him.’’ 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 239 


And I sat rather numb, wondering what this last wish 
could be. 

‘Tell him,’’ he went on, ‘‘I want him to be more of a 
public man than I have been. I want him to read more 
than I have. I want him to work less, know more, and 
serve his county and State as I have not had the ability 
to do.’’ 

Can any one think that I shall ever forget that a 
hard-working dirt farmer uttered a sentiment of such 
nobility? How long will it take to efface from my 
mind the belief that farmers have it in them to be 
publie-spirited citizens ? 

‘‘But,’’ you ask, ‘‘did the son do as his father 
wished ?”’ 

The answer is, he did. The story is too long, too 
intimate, to tell here. Suffice it to say that the son’s 
influence in the last twenty years has penetrated the 
councils of farmers of his State, weighed with the gov- 
ernor and legislators, and won a place of honor for him 
in the state college of agriculture. 

Here is Frederick Williams, farmer president of the 
Academy board of trustees, direct descendant of Roger 
Williams of Rhode Island fame, a stern man of highly 
independent ways, a reader, thinker, traveler, a public 
leader. No one in his community thought of commit- 
ting the community to a line of action without first 
finding out ‘‘what Fred Williams thinks about it.’’ 
Farmer Williams was the benevolent dictator of public 
opinion by right of the power of thinking; while Norris 
Shepardson was the dictator of the community con- 


240 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


science by right of his unerring response to the claims 
of mercy, love, and beauty. 

And here is Dr. Chapman, country physician, media- 
tor between the weakness of human nature and the 
stern demands of educational standards. I was a 
youth; the doctor was in his prime. He would take 
me to the marshes duck-hunting. I would pour into 
his ears, seeing that he was a member of the school- 
board, the shortcomings of this boy and that in school. 
Pranks, mischief, cards, tobacco, idleness a spree! 
These worried me. I would cut the boy out of the 
school herd, corral him at home, and set him to work. 
The doctor would calm my fears and worries: 

‘‘T have seen many such boys in the Academy in my 
time,’’ he would remark, ‘‘and they have invariably 
turned out to be good men. Be patient. Try them a 
little longer.’’ 

The doctor knew these farm families as well as he 
knew the clever little mare he drove the country-side 
over. He knew the worst that could be said of them, 
but he knew the best; and he handed on to me the 
philosophy of the best. It was a rare good fortune 
for me to have known a real country doctor for thirteen 
years. 

And there was George Bull, farmer, financier, musi- 
cian, hunter, trusted citizen. Can a man farm the land, 
soil his clothes, be weary with labor, and maintain a 
refinement of mind like that of the artist? George Bull 
did. Shall I ever forget the long room in his farm- 
house dedicated to music, where on occasions neighbors 
and friends would gather and listen to the musical re- 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 241 


cital given by the Bull family, each member taught to 
play some instrument of music? 

Do you say, ‘‘This is a freak’’? 

No, not a freak, for you must remember that for sixty 
years the Academy had provided a music department. 
Music was a commonplace among the thousand farm 
homes. Again you will note the likeness to the folk 
schools of Scandinavia. How can I entertain, after this 
deep experience in community life, the idea that culture 
cannot step over the farm threshold? 

Kunice Bull Mather, farm housewife, is still living 
at a ripe old age; mind keen, eye undimmed, a heart 
open to the ery of need anywhere in the world; but 
thrifty, saving, as a matter of religion, also. Her 
father in his time was a member of the Academy 
school-board. Often have I heard Eunice Mather tell of 
the stormy, snow-bound winter days when she was a 
child. The monthly board meeting would come round 
in February, snow or no snow, and the family lived 
three miles from the Academy. Eunice’s mother would 
say to her husband: 

‘“My dear, don’t go out to-night. The storm is dread- 
ful. I am afraid you will take your death. Please 
give up the meeting to-night.’’ 

Eunice remembered well her father’s invariable 
reply: 

‘“We must keep the Academy going for our children. 
You know it has meant everything to us. I cannot stay 
home just because it storms.”’ 

And after the hard day in the woods, out into the 
blast he would go, returning wearily far into the night. 


242 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


This, I say, is the kind of tradition handed down from 
father to sen, which, when one has once seen it, burns 
its way into one’s soul. When the passing of her hus- 
band William came, an event which meant a great deal 
to me as a friend and teacher of his son, I pondered much 
over the kind of memorial that should be raised to his 
memory, for I knew that in this community it was not 
generally considered decent to let a farmer pass out 
and into the other world without a gift to the Academy 
in hismemory. It was not many weeks afterward, when 
I said to Eunice: 

“Your husband was one of the best farmers in this 
county. His name should be written in some way into 
the cause of good farming.’’ 

Eunice replied, ‘‘ Yes, that is so; I will think it over.’’ 

A month passed. I was asked to come out to the 
Mather farm. Eunice had been ‘‘thinking it over.’’ 
This is what she said: 

‘“Why couldn’t we have in the Academy a regular 
department of agriculture just as we have a music de- 
partment, an art department, and a business depart- 
ment? Here we are teaching our farm boys banking, 
when they must go back to the farm and need to know 
the practices of better farming.”’ 

I clapped my hands with joy. ‘‘You are right. I 
see it as clear as day,’’ I exclaimed. 

Then the statesmanship of Eunice appeared: ‘‘I 
will pay your expenses to the state college of agriculture. 
Go down there and ask the dean if it is a practical idea. 
If the college will indorse the proposition, I will give 
five thousand dollars and my sister-in-law will give five 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 243 


thousand to help endow a department of agriculture in 
the Academy in memory of the two brothers, William 
and George.’’ 

The story is soon told. I went and saw the college 
people; and, strange as it may seem now when thou- 
sands of high schools throughout America have such an 
agricultural course, the professors said: 

‘“We do not know of any such course in secondary 
schools, but we believe the idea can be carried out, and 
we will contrive a course and give you a man to 
teach it.’’ 

So the Mather School of Agriculture was started in 
the Academy in 1901. There it stands to-day, one of 
those pioneer ideas, by reason of the hope and affection 
of two great farm women. How can I help but believe 
in the American farm woman, in her capacity, in her 
eulture and leadership ? 


SourcEs OF Horse IN Fine AMERICAN RURAL 
INSTITUTIONS 


If you have ever seen an instance of a fine rural en- 
terprise, institution, activity, or association, has it not 
thrilled you, and reéstablished waning hope of such 
things otherwhere? The John Swaney school in Illi- 
nois filled my heart with hope for rural education, 
as I stood in the grove that surrounds the school and 
heard the story of Uncle John Swaney’s idea and gift. 
Just a farmer. But he had the idea. So the memory 
of great consolidations in other States has many times 
lifted my depression. I see now those buildings and 
teachers and children in Polk County, Wisconsin; in 


244 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


Minnesota, far out on the prairie; in the San Luis 
valley, Colorado; in the Cache valley, Utah. I hear 
again the farmers talking to me about how these great 
schools came to be. I feel anew that it is not the old 
New England farmer alone who can entertain and hold 
dear the educational idea. I see in the San Luis valley 
the Mexican farmer, who, living though he does in a 
small adobe farm-house, still prizes the ‘‘great school’’ 
for his children. I see the hard-pushed potato farmer, 
living in the one-story house, proudly pointing to the 
great Sargent school. I see the Mormon bishop in the 
North Cache valley, driving his team and beet cultivator 
from one small holding over to another in the typical 
Utah agricultural village community. I remember his 
eulogy of the schools for his children. These vivid 
pictures stay by me during the dark days when I travel 
through country, rich in land maybe, but where the new 
day has not yet cast up one rosy finger. 

How can I ever forget the negro farms and farm- 
steads in Gloucester County, Virginia? There they 
elisten white, trim, neat. I remember saying to my 
guide from Hampton Institute, ‘‘I can’t some way be- 
lieve that these are farms of colored people.’’ But 
there the colored people were, and there were their well 
dressed children. I visited their schools. Fine schools. 
I could not keep back the question of unbelief: 

‘‘How come these things?’’ 

Then I hear the old story, ‘‘Leaders with ideals be- 
longing to their own race and class, showing the way to 
better things,”’ 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 245 


Then I learn that these colored people own their farms 
and homes. Then I hear of that colored man Walker 
and his hope. I see his farm-house, a Mecca. Then I 
believe all over again in my heart that the new day 
can come anywhere. 


DENMARK As A SOURCE OF Hopr 


You can read about the farmers of Denmark, and 
your soul will surely bound up; but when you see Den- 
mark, see her farms and farm-houses, her schools and 
schoolmasters, her genius for collective effort, you come 
into the sacred possession, if you have any humanity 
at all, of a secret of race culture, a species of religion 
before which you bow in reverence. And this posses- 
sion of yours you take back to America, and it sticks 
by you through the thick of the struggle with disap- 
pointment, dismay, and despair over the slowness of 
American rural progress. 

It was in Roskilde, Sjelland, Denmark; I was seated 
in the office of the head master of the folk school. I 
had come to interview the head master. I spoke no 
Danish. He spoke English, but did not have command 
of enough English words to carry the full meaning of his 
deep philosophic ideas. 

He said: ‘‘I am not sure to say what I want to say. 
Let me get the Danish-English dictionary. We place it 
between us, thus. Now let us talk.’’ 

So, with the dictionary as interpreter, he told the 
story of the Danish folk-school movement, told me its 


246 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


genius and meaning to Danes, told me the romance of 
the founding of the Roskilde school. 

‘‘We are a small nation,’’ the schoolmaster said, ‘‘and 
every Dane counts. When the farm boy comes to our 
folk school, by the living word we interpret to him the 
soul of Denmark.”’ 

The schoolmaster’s eye grew bright; his manner be- 
came intense, eager, convincing; his words sped rapidly 
until he struck a lingual snag; when he snatched the 
dictionary, thumbed the pages, and then took up his 
story again. 

‘““We tell these boys the lives of Danes of old. We 
say: ‘You now are Denmark. The soul is intrusted to 
you. You must carry in you the life of the nation’; 
and the living word is caught and embodied in these 
farm boys.’’ 

These Danish schoolmasters are like the prophets of 
Israel. They are great souls themselves. Learned, 
simple in habits, emotional, their psychology is tremen- 
dously real. They enact the drama of a nation day by 
day before the youth. And the youth are initiated into 
national life as workers of land and growers of crops 
and animals. I came out of the folk schools melted 
over and remade. If Denmark’s schoolmen could mold 
the youth of Denmark to great living on the farms of 
Denmark, schoolmen in America could mold America’s 
farm boys into great American farmers. Little Den- 
mark, you shelter great men. But you are simply ris- 
ing to the heights of humanity. Humanity is essentially 
great. This is the basic fact back of hope in all 
optimists. 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 24:7 


Sources oF Hore IN GEORGE W'ASHINGTON’S 
F'ARM-HOUSE 


Washington’s Mount Vernon farm-house stands to-day 
very much as Washington planned and used it. Wash- 
ington was convinced that his farm-house site could 
not be excelled for pleasant situation in the United 
States of his day. He says in a letter to Arthur Young: 
‘‘T may without knowing it be biased in favor of the 
river on which I live. No other estate in the United 
States is more pleasantly situated than this.’’ 

The Mount Vernon farm-house, as everybody knows, 
has a wide front looking out across the Potomac River ; 
a somewhat restricted rear, looking through a vista of 
two rows of noble trees to fields dropping gently down to 
a wood-clad ravine; two wings stretching in rounded 
curves on either end of the house into areas of outbuild- 
ings, gardens, and barns, quietly suppressed by various 
types of inclosure. 

I have visited Mount Vernon several times for the 
express purpose of catching the spirit of the place as a 
farm-house site. I have never failed to hear in these 
visits naive exclamations of delight from the crowd of 
visitors when looking at front, rear, or wings. There 
is no question that the house is a farm-house. As you 
reflect, you see at the far opening of the rear vista 
meadow-land retreating to the woods. If you look over 
the front lawn to the left a few hundred feet, you notice 
the corn-field and shocks of corn standing sentry. 
When you start your survey of the inclosures at the 
wings of the house, you see the red roofs of the unmis- 
takable farm barns and the outlines of a kitchen garden. 


248 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


The farm is around you but in modest retirement. The 
house and its setting are de-occupationalized and thor- 
oughly humanized; the recognition of this fact is seen 
in the visitor’s emotional delight. 

An analysis of the psychology of the humanizing 
elements in the Mount Vernon farm-house site confirms 
us in the principle of detachment from the business and 
workaday spirit of farming. The detachment is ac- 
complished most dramatically in the treatment of farm 
buildings, shops, barn-yards, and machinery by psycho- 
logical barriers and inclosures at the sides of the house. 
A volume of detail might doubtless be written at this 
point, to illuminate Washington’s method of secluding 
the necessary farm work, in close proximity, however, to 
the house. All we can do here is to indicate broadly 
Washington’s method of treatment in detaching the 
house from the workaday elements of the farm. The 
principal device is a low brick wall or closely cropped 
hedge, stretching from either wing on the right and 
left, inclosing the garden and one set of buildings in an 
angle on the left and the barns and outbuildings in an 
angle on the right. The bareness of the brick walls is 
relieved along its length by ivy. Topping the walls 
at intervals are small-sized trees, which impose foliage 
eolor upon the wooden surfaces of buildings in the in- 
closure. At strategic distances are tall, broadly spread- 
ing trees, strong companion pieces to wall, ivy, and shrub 
in the task of screening off the farm work and secluding 
the house. 

The tall trees outside the walls in the rear of the house 
give form and frame to the vista in the rear; lawn, sky 


SOURCES OF RURAL HOPE 249 


above, tall tree foliage, sky at end, meadow-land drop- 
ping out of sight. In the front of the house the lawn 
drops gradually below the level of the house toward the 
river a hundred feet below, and the expanse of the 
river is glimpsed only through a setting of large oaks 
on the river-bank. Washington writes to his farm man- 
ager, saying, ‘‘I do not hesitate to confess that reclaim- 
ing and laying the grounds down handsomely in grass, 
and having the woods thinned or in clumps, about the 
mansion house, is among my first objects and wishes.’’ 

The most significant and cheering element in the 
method of detaching the Mount Vernon farm-house from 
the occupational part of farming is that the exclusion 
and screening are done so largely by suggestion rather 
than by actual shutting out of every scintilla of farm 
work. The low wall and hedge are a psychological line 
of division and exclusion. We can peer over, but we 
do not. The roofs of the barns are visible, but lost to 
sense in the competing humanism of trees and framed 
sky. 

The successful detachment of the Mount Vernon house 
from clinging, tagging work habits leaves the house en- 
vironment free from humanizing effects. The dignity 
and majesty of tall trees, noble river, lofty sky, over- 
looking view, were used to the best advantage by 
Washington. 

Turning now away from Mount Vernon to the humbler 
farm homes of America, and wondering whether these 
farm-houses and homes can be detached from farm work 
thoroughly enough to humanize their immediate physical 
settings, we pause. From Washington to our day is a 


250 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


great step. John Jones down on his farm in Virginia 
has no slaves to do his work now. Washington was a 
wealthy farmer of the country gentleman type, too. 
John Jones, moreover, is a hard-working dirt farmer. 
But George Washington’s ideals of independence and 
national life have filtered down to the humble school- 
boy in the little country school. I cannot get away from 
the memory of Mount Vernon, as a farm-house, a farm 
home, which may carry its humanizing lesson to every 
American farmer. While I pause and wonder, I find 
myself saying, ‘‘Yes, the Washington farm-house can be 
a pattern for every farm home, even as Washington him- 
self is a pattern for every American.’’ 


sé 


CHAPTER XVII 
THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND?! 
1 
My Lapy Aanp THE Ration 


HAT you need,’’ said the doctor, ‘‘is exercise. 
Your muscles ought to work all the time as 
your mind does. Keep going, keep going, 
keep going.’’ 
So I went back to teaching, but followed the physi- 


cian’s injunction to keep going, walking miles and miles 


every day, practising with the dumb-bells hours on hours 
until the muscles would scarcely move. But no sleep. 
A wakefulness by night became a habit like the wakeful- 
ness by day. 

The doctor was somewhat discomfited when the ex- 
ercise cure failed. After temporizing a few weeks with 
powders and pills he reluctantly consented to a san- 
itarium, and there followed six months of baths; Turkish 
baths, electric baths, salt baths; machine massage, hand 


1“The Skims” is a series of thumb-nail sketches depicting 

some human elements in country life, in black and white, out of 

the experience of the writer while a resident in a submarginal 

rural community. The sketches are intended to convey senti- 

ments of a problematic character that resist a formal treatment. 
251 


252 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


massage, and more walking. Always I kept going, but 
still no sleep. 

After the failure of sanitarium treatment, the 
doctor, almost at his wits’ end, braced up and exclaimed: 
‘“Novelty, novelty is the thing. Go visit your friends. 
Keep going, but go from State to State and visit your 
friends. That ’sit. Visit your friends.’’ 

So I rode to the east on a bicycle, visiting all my 
friends. Then I went far to the west, and kept going 
from friend to friend. Still no sleep. 

As a last resort the doctor remarked: ‘‘You had 
better get next to the land. Keep going, but get your 
feet used to going on plowed ground. Keep close to the 
land.’’ 

Then it was that I looked around for the land I 
wanted to live with. I decided to choose the most novel 
land I could find. No ordinary farm would suit. I 
wanted a land unlike any other on the face of the earth, 
a primitive land that I could clean up, log, burn, and 
plow for the first time. When, therefore, in my wander- 
ings I came to the Skims I was satisfied. All unknow- 
ing, I had drifted, just as the rest of the people of the 
Skims had done, unconsciously to my own. I had come 
into the land of machines with broken handles, of people 
with misfortunes, into the country of the lame, the halt, 
the blind, and those who could not sleep. 

The Skims forms an island of about five hundred 
square miles, all sand and jack-pines; or, perhaps better, 
an archipelago of big and little sand islands, surrounded 
by a rough clay sea of oaks and maples, channeled 
through and around by currents of good tilled land. 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 253 


A generation ago an army of titanic pines was encamped 
there. The lumber vikings dispersed this army, skim- 
ming off the pines like cream from a milk-pan, and left 
behind hacked stumps, rotting limbs, mutilated tree 
bodies, with some bare, searred, lofty trunks standing 
like sentinels over their dead. Now all this is more or 
less shadowed and lost in the midst of jack-pines and 
serub-oaks, 

The land was to be had for a song, and sand plows 
up easily, and though the winds may blow the crops 
away, submarginal people who are pushed by com- 
petition off the marginal clearings stick like sand-burs 
to the Skims. 

In the center of the Skims was a little wood-colored 
trading town, with wooden stores built with sham wooden 
fronts; wooden, wood-colored, one-story houses set on 
wooden blocks without cellars, their back yards backed 
up to the Skims, each with its little sand garden where 
the wind played, making sand-piles around the potatoes; 
and the jack-pines played another lonesome game with 
one another, running from close to the wood-colored 
houses off to illimitable areas. But it was not all drear- 
iness, for rippling through the town was a miracle 
in sand, a spring brook, almost a river, clear as crystal 
and filled with speckled trout. The wonder was 
that the brook never dried up and never sank out of 
sight. 

I walked for weeks, tramping about from early Febru- 
ary until spring, searching for a stretch of land with 
a little bit of clay and a maple-tree. You weren’t of 
the quality on the Skims unless you had a little outcrop 


254 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


of clay on your land. You could n’t take part in the 
general-store discussion unless you could boast of a 
stump turned over with clay hanging to its roots. And 
the man that had a maple, especially a hard maple, on 
his forty, well, nothing was too good for him. And I 
planned to be among the Skims’ best citizens. 

Day after day I stumbled through jack-pine sand and 
ash swamp, along the running brook, until finally one 
day in April I wandered upon two forties cut by the 
spring brook, three miles from the house, that met my 
every requirement. They could be had for thirty cents 
an acre with a tax title; the deal was soon closed, and I 
felt that the land was mine and the sleep that I was 
seeking was almost within my grasp. 

The next desirable part of my equipment was a cow. 
I didn’t intend to leave any stone unturned toward mak- 
ing a success on the Skims. Everybody else had a cow, 
or a sort of a cow, and so I must have one, too. I did n’t 
know much about buying cows, but I played safe and 
went to the butcher; I thought maybe he could tell me 
where to find one. Curiously enough, he had one he 
wanted to sell. She looked big and black, and so I 
bought her and took her home with me, determined to 
give her the best the land could afford. We began by 
naming her My Lady. 

We had n’t had My Lady very long when we found 
that she possessed all the qualities of a natural leader. 
She always led the tinkling village cows home at night 
from the Skims pastures. We needed no bell for her. 
She always confidently headed the procession. And 
she had other qualities of a strong country personal- 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND) 255 


ity. She was firm in her ideas and fixed in her ways. 

I discovered this when I attempted to feed My Lady 
the best balanced ration known to government bulletins. 
I had determined that though My Lady was of the 
Skims, she should fare with the best, so I had sent for 
packages of Washington bulletins, which I studied re- 
ligiously until I became the only living authority on 
feeds and feeding on the Skims. Then I proceeded to 
send to the mail-order house for the very best grain 
mixture prescribed. It came in due time, and was all 
that one might wish. It was a rich golden brown, and 
you could tell it yards away without seeing it. 

I was delighted with it. ‘‘How glad,’’ thought I, 
‘My Lady will be to get some of this nice rich food after 
starving all her life on Skims grass and corn nubbins!’’ 
With joy in my heart I measured out the first ration 
for My Lady. It was then I discovered her to be a 
haughty aristocrat. She bent her head, looked at that 
splendid mail-order, bulletin-recommended stuff, looked 
at it keenly, sniffed, and tossed her head proudly in the 
air. She would n’t touch it! 

I can’t tell you how astonished and grieved I was. I 
could n’t believe it of her; so I left it there. Maybe 
she ’d think better of it and eat it after a while. But, 
no, indeed, she ’d have nothing to do with it. So I was 
obliged to throw it to the hens. They ate it. They ’d 
eat anything. 

But I couldn’t give up. I wanted My Lady to try 
this delicious food I ’d taken all the trouble to get for 
her, so I went over to Neighbor Dugle and asked for 
advice. Dugle was a retired Skims farmer, 


256 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


‘*Did you wet the meal up?’’ he asked me. 

*“No,’’ said I, ‘‘I never thought of that.’’ 

“Wet it all up nice with warm water, and make a 
mash of it, and she ’ll like it,’’ said he. 

So I went home and made a warm mash for My Lady. 
But do you think she would touch it? Not she! She 
took one sniff, then tossed her head higher than ever; 
and I had to feed it out to the hens again. 

However, I wasn’t to be discouraged, so I asked the 
advice of Neighbor Porter, another retired farmer. 
Porter scratched his head thoughtfully for a minute and 
then said, ‘‘This cow is a Skims cow. She ain’t used to 
any rich foods. Mix it in with bran for a while so she ’Il 
get acquainted with the new food kind of gradual.”’ 

‘*T declare,’’ said I, ‘‘I never thought of that. I ’ll 
try it.’”’ So I did. But it was of no use. My Lady 
was still disdainful, and the good mail-order food went 
to the chickens as usual. 

By this time I was getting pretty determined, and so 
I asked counsel from everybody I met. 

‘“What your cow wants is corn on the cob,’’ said a 
woman. ‘‘She’s never had any other sort of grain; 
she ’s been raised on it. Put a few pieces around in 
your new feed for a bait.’”’ 

‘‘That ’s a good scheme,’’ said I. ‘‘I never thought of 
that.’’ 

But good as the plan was, it didn’t work on My Lady 
of the Skims. She picked every one of those miserable 
corn nubbins daintily out of the golden meal and ate 
them cob and all, but would n’t touch my balanced ration. 

So it went on. Another Skims dweller suggested 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 257 


ground oats and corn; another, salt; and I tried them 
both with no success. But I kept at it. It had become 
a morning and evening ritual with me. Every day for 
weeks I placed the mathematical meal before My Lady, 
and every day it was thrown out to the grateful hens. 

And one day when it had got to be so much a habit 
with me that it was almost subconscious, My Lady of the 
Skims ate her ration! 

Yes, sir, licked it all up clean, the way they do, you 
know, so that there wasn’t a speck left even in the 
corners. Well, I just stood there and stared at her. I 
was more astonished than when she had n’t eaten it the 
first day. 

I went around on the other side of the stanchion and 
scanned the big black freak from head to tail, both over 
and under. 

Then I ran into the house and called my wife. ‘‘My 
dear, you ought to come out here. My Lady has eaten 
the bulletin ration! Come see for yourself; she has 
kicked herself all full of dents, because she had n’t eaten 
this good stuff before!’’ 

I have regarded My Lady, since this episode of waiting, 
as an excellent illustration of the changing psychology of 
the new farmer. 


2 


Tur Cp 


If I must smoke my brain out with burning stumps 
and logs and get my feet accustomed to plowed ground, 
a horse, of course, must be added to my stock of ap- 


258 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


pliances. That was how I came into possession of the 
Cid. Tho Cid was an institution. 

I had gone down to the city horse-fair in the hope of 
finding a suitable companion for my labors, but the 
prices were too high for my pocket book; so I traveled 
back home, thinking that perhaps, after all, it would be 
better to get a horse that had been raised on the Skims 
and grown wise to its ways. Accordingly, not knowing 
where else to go, I went to the chief middleman of the 
community, the butcher, to ask him if he knew where I 
could get a horse. As luck would have it, he did know 
of one, eight miles out on the Skims. 

The next day I borrowed a rig and drove out through 
the sand lands, where only jack-pines and thin grass 
whiskers grew, over a road that twisted about itself 
until I was almost lost several times. 

At length, however, away back in the woods, I came 
upon a log eabin, outside of which were three or four 
children, barefooted, although the snow still lay on the 
ground in patches. I hitched my horse and went inside 
the two-room shack. It was pretty bare inside; there 
were cracks in the hewn plank floor, and the family was 
evidently economizing, for there was no fire in the stove 
when I entered; but they soon started one and got it to 
blazing cheerfully. Then I broached the subject of the 
horse. 

The man said, ‘‘ We have no horse to sell.’’ 

The woman said, ‘‘ We have a horse to sell.’ 

Some of the children stood with the mother, some with 
the father; so I sat down to a council of war. 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 259 


‘You know,’’ said the man, ‘‘we need that horse in 
the spring.’’ 

‘‘But,’’ protested the woman, ‘‘look at our family. 
The price for the horse would buy two cows.”’ 

‘‘Then you ’ll have to hitch the cows in with the old 
mare in the spring plowing,’’ said the man. 

At this point, however, the woman clinched her argu- 
ment by reminding the husband that she possessed a 
scrap of paper saying that the horse in question be- 
longed to her; and so it was decided under protest to 
sell me the horse. 

They brought him up in front of the house, from the 
snow-covered field, where he had been pawing to get at 
the dead grass, and said, ‘‘This is Cid.’’ I never knew 
the exact spelling or derivation of this name, but took it 
for granted; and afterward my wife and I translated it 
into The Cid. 

When The Cid was led up to the front of the cabin for 
inspection, he could not have been said really to walk. 
He lounged up. His head hung away down, not to miss 
any stray piece of forage, I suspect. Every muscle in 
his body sagged and moped. The original starch had 
gone from his dejected ears. He weighed about eleven 
hundred pounds, but any one not knowing how long his 
hair, or, strictly speaking, his fur, was, would have said 
he weighed more. I never saw anything in still life so 
much like a cartoon after a Democratic defeat as The 
Cid. | 

I jumped into the rig and whipped up to get out of 
sight before the warring family changed its mind, lead- 


260 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


ing The Cid behind; but the first step almost dislocated 
my arm. J had driven the eight miles out through the 
deep sand in two hours, but it took the whole afternoon 
to get home. Evidently The Cid had only one gait. He 
was what you might call a self-sufficing horse. He had 
been out there so long digging for his own living, explor-’ 
ing the land for food in summer and winter, looking out 
for rattlesnakes and fighting them, keeping shy of 
swamp-holes and peat-bogs, that he had grown very 
deliberate and independent in his ways. 

No, that horse would not trot. It didn’t do a bit of 
good to whip him. He couldn’t feel it through his 
coarse thick skin and fur coat, and, besides, he had n’t 
a nerve in his body. But The Cid was land wise and 
just naturally took to logging. Why, that horse was a 
log artist and could pile logs like an elephant. I had 
got a log chain from my friend, Montgomery Ward, 
the mail-order man. I made a sled out of ash poles and 
serub-oak pins, and The Cid would load up the sled with 
ash logs and draw them to the house for fire-wood with 
never a flinch, whatever the going. One day, in plowing, 
I disobeyed The Cid’s deliberate pause. The horse knew 
he was approaching the danger-point of a hidden pine- 
stump root; at my blind and foolish urging ahead he 
went, but it broke the plow beam. After that, I always 
relied on The Cid’s instinets, for he was Skims-educated 
from his eyelashes to his toe-nails. 

We tried to use The Cid for a carriage-horse. You 
should hear my wife tell about that! We had to give it 
up, and about all the road traveling The Cid did with 
us was when I drove him every day to and from the 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 261 


clearings. On this daily drive we passed through a de- 
serted lumber town, with tumble-down, empty houses, 
crumbling walls, and weed-grown streets. The only live 
spot in the place was the little Skims school-house that 
stood in the midst of the common. This plot of land, 
however, held more sweet grass and clover than all my 
farm together. And The Cid had evidently taken note 
of this fact. 

One noon, when as usual I had unharnessed The Cid 
before beginning to eat my lunch, I looked up, expecting 
to see him gingerly nibbling the coarse saw-edged grass 
in his customary way, and found to my surprise that 
the old fellow was gone. I got up and looked across the 
field, and there was The Cid going along at a rather 
rapid walk. As he got nearer the log fence I ’d built 
around the clearing his gait increased, and he went 
right over that fence with a nimbleness that was surpris- 
ing in a horse of his nature. 

Then as he skirted the ridge he broke into a gallop, 
and soon he was floating along at a pace that was fairly 
Arabian. I could hardly believe my eyes. The starch 
had come back into his ears, his muscles worked fast and 
strong, his head was flung high, and his long tail rose 
like the decoration of a plumed knight. 

It was a surprise, but a rather sorry one. Here was 
The Cid disappearing over the hill, I knew not where. 
I must not worry nor overwork, for these are against the 
rules of sleep. Fame, money, success, were nothing. 
Only sleep was of importance. But still I needed that 
horse, and so I had to go after him. 

I started out, not knowing how far I ’d have to go, 


262 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


but finally after plodding in the sand half an hour, I 
came to the deserted village, and there, over in the com- 
mon by the school-house, I spied The Cid chewing briskly 
at that good sweet grass with an energy and enthu- 
siasm I had never suspected in him. Then he caught 
sight of me, and his whole aspect changed. The starch 
went out of his ears, his head dropped, and his whole 
body became limp; again he was The Cid, the Skims log- 
horse. He surrendered as I went up to him, acknowledg- 
ing my superiority. I got on his back, and he moped 
drearily to the wagon; and when we got there it was time 
to go home. 

This sort of Wanderlust happened again and again 
until I realized I had to deal with a dual nature if not 
with a new being. For the space of a few rare moments, 
at regular intervals, The Cid would reveal bewildering 
possibilities. When the master idea took possession of 
him it made him over. In these later years when I think 
of The Cid it is as a striking symbol of the unrevealed 
capacities of the undeveloped land-worker, the sturdy, 
dependable, plodding farmer. 


3 


THE OLp WoMAN, THE CLAY PIPE, AND THE 
WHEELBARROW 


It was a funny thing how I got to know her. I was 
driving down along the Skims road one day when I sud- 
denly caught a glimpse through the jack-pines of a 
slouch-hat and a man’s coat. The next time was late 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 2638 


at night along by the row of white birches just the other 
side of the swamp. This time I caught sight of the 
man’s coat, the slouch-hat, and the wheel of a wheel- 
barrow. Several days went by before I had any sight 
of the slouch-hat, the man’s coat, and the wheelbarrow 
again; but one morning, disappearing through the 
swamp oaks, I got another fleeting look, and this time 
I saw a whiff of smoke from a pipe. That same night I 
saw the wheelbarrow again, and this time I spied a 
swishing feminine skirt. So I came to know the Old 
Woman of the Clay Pipe and the Wheelbarrow. I 
often caught sight of her after that, but she never 
seemed to have anything in her mysterious wheelbarrow ; 
and, curiously enough, I always saw her going and never 
saw her come back. 

I was destined, however, to meet the Old Woman with 
the Clay Pipe and the Wheelbarrow face to face. One 
noon, when I was out on the Skims, down under the 
wagon eating my lunch, while The Cid, with his harness 
all off, was browsing around on sand-bur grass, with no 
signs of getting an idea, suddenly I heard sounding out 
in the direction of one of the land-locked lakes a whack, 
whack, whack! I straightened up and listened. This 
sudden interruption of the Skims stillness reminded me 
of the old days at the Academy when I slept on my elbow 
and was continually awakened by unusual sounds. Up 
to that time, so far as I knew, nobody had ever walked 
on my land since I had taken possession, but here was 
undeniably an intruding noise. It was no team that 
made that desolate, oft-repeated thump-thump, and it 
could n’t have been a woodpecker. It was the noise of 


264 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


a hundred industrious woodpeckers all working in 
unison. . 

I stopped chewing so as not to obscure the noise. 
Sure enough, it was from the dead lake direction, com- 
ing up distinctly and clearly, thwack, thwack! I 
could n’t stand it; I had to know what the noise was. 
With curiosity burning within me, I hastily finished my 
lunch, and, leaving The Cid to carry out any ideas he 
chose, I walked toward the upland, over the log fence, 
over the table-land, through oak scrubs by one dead lake, 
up the sand slopes to a little sand cafion, the whacks 
growing sharper at every step, so that I was sure I was 
headed right. 

Pretty soon I came in sight of a pile of four-foot 
stubs, with sawed-off ends, half a cord or so right there 
in the midst of my farm. I went around the wood-pile. 
There was the Old Woman with the Clay Pipe and the 
Wheelbarrow, with an ax in her hand, chopping down 
one of those pine stubs. Whack! Pretty soon she saw 
me and stopped. I came up and said to her with a 
good deal of severity, ‘‘Don’t you know that I own this 
land ?’’ 

‘*No,’’ said she. 

‘*T do,’’ said I, firmly. 

She gave me a rather curious glance, and said, ‘‘I ’ve 
cut wood here for twenty year.’’ 

““To you have to do this?’’ I inquired. 

‘‘Nobody to do it for me,’’ she said, shortly. 

‘‘How ’s that?’’ I asked. 

‘*Well,’’ said she, serewing her eyes up as though she 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND) 265 


were trying to look back into the years, ‘‘it was different 
when my boy Jim lived at home.”’ 

‘“Where is your home?”’’ I asked. 

‘‘Up in the old lumber town,’’ she answered. ‘‘Me 
and my boy Jim moved in there in the big lumber days.’’ 

‘<Where ’s Jim now?”’ I asked. 

‘‘Don’ know,’’ said she, hacking away at the stub in 
an embarrassed fashion. ‘‘Don’ know. He left right 
after the timber was cut down around here looking for 
another job. He ain’t never come back, Jim ain’t.’’ 

‘‘Haven’t you heard from him, either?’’ I inquired. 

‘“No,’’ said she, getting out her pipe, ‘‘no, Jim ain’t 
no hand to write.’’ 

‘‘Why do you suppose he did n’t come back?’’ I con- 
tinued inquisitively. 

‘Oh, I ’m expectin’ him home any day. He always 
was a great hand for home,’’ she said, puffing away at 
her pipe. ‘‘It was different when Jim was home. I 
didn’t have to hunt my own wood, then. But I’ve 
been a-cutting it here now for twenty year.”’ 

Well, there wasn’t much that I could do or say after 
that. It was a rather awkward situation. The Old 
Woman with the Clay Pipe and the Wheelbarrow was n’t 
begging; she ’d been cutting here ‘‘twenty year’’ and 
naturally felt perfectly at home. And I couldn’t be 
harsh with her, for the Old Woman with the Clay Pipe 
and the Wheelbarrow had been transmuted for me into 
the mother of Jim, Jim whom she expected home ‘‘any 
day.’’ 

So I stammered and cleared my throat. ‘‘ You keep 


266 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


right on cutting here,’’ I said to her. ‘‘Any of these 
stubs you want you can have.’’ 

Then I went back to The Cid and the clearing, the 
mystery solved. I used to see her quite often after that, 
either out on the Skims with her wheelbarrow, or up 
around her old ramshackle house in the deserted log 
village. She seemed to take quite a bit of pride in try- 
ing to fix up the tumble-down old shack, and she never 
gave up the idea that her boy Jim might possibly drop 
in on her any day. But of course he never did. Of 
course not. Of course not. But possibly, just pos- 
sibly, he may have. He may have. He may have. 


4 


THe W’HAY Boy 


Johnny the W’hay Boy never deserted his home, 
mever ran away and left his mother waiting for him 
twenty years, but he wasn’t a son of whom you’d 
expect his mother to be very proud. I had heard Johnny 
a good while before I actually saw him coming out of 
the pines cracking his long-lashed whip and giving his 
weird ery of ‘‘W’hay there!’’ in his high erackly voice. 

When I first caught sight of him, I concluded he must 
be a boy of about twelve, for he was short and under- 
sized; but when I got a closer view, saw the large head 
set on the scrawny, narrow-shouldered body, realized 
that his eyes were red and bleary, and his hair gray, I 
knew that this old slouch-hat and flapping man-sized 
clothes covered an oldish chap of fifty. 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 267 


Johnny the W’hay Boy was simple-minded; his tastes 
were extremely primitive, and his language was limited 
almost entirely to the loud ‘‘W’hay there!’’ with which 
he addressed his special charges, the cows. About a 
dozen of the villagers paid Johnny twenty cents apiece 
a week to take their cows out to the Skims commons and 
bring them in again at nightfall. So early each morn- 
ing Johnny the W’hay Boy would strut like a pouter- 
pigeon through the little village, gathering in the cows, 
after the fashion of the European goose-tender, all the 
while snapping this great whip-lash of his, which must 
have been at least ten feet long. I don’t suppose he 
ever touched a cow with it, but it gave him a feeling of 
superiority to have it, and he took great pride in this pe- 
culiar accomplishment of his. 

The cows were to Johnny the W’hay Boy what his dog 
is to any Rip Van Winkle. Take away Rip’s dog, and 
you deprive him of his last shred of self-esteem; take 
away Johnny the W’hay Boy’s cows, and you have 
crushed his personality. He was brusque to them; that 
was simply his manner. But he always looked after 
them fondly. 

Johnny’s solicitude for his charges was matched only 
by the care bestowed by his mother on Johnny himself. 
Before I knew that Johnny and his mother lived in the 
little wood-colored cottage at the edge of the village, 
right next to the Skims, I used to notice in the yard at 
the back a great pile of wood débris, knots from rotting 
pine logs, pitchy little pine stumps that could be pried 
out of the ground, slabs hacked from the resinous part 


268 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


of big stumps, occasional black-end stubs, all in one 
conglomerate mass as high as the house itself. 

‘*My,’’ I said, ‘‘what a great pile of wood! I wonder 
who built it?”’ 

And one day, when I was on my way up from the 
Skims, I found out. Just off the sands I saw a two- 
wheeled cart with a box filled with the forage wood, old 
pine pieces, and occasional oak boughs. In the thills of 
this queer wagon, leaning hard against an old leather 
strap connecting the thill ends, stood Johnny the W’hay 
Boy, never saying a word, but tugging away, dragging 
the cart through the deep sand. That was surprising 
enough, but when I saw, with both hands on one side 
of the thills, a white-haired, bent, and shriveled woman 
of eighty and more, who I knew must be Johnny’s 
mother, pulling with tragic earnestness, I was fairly 
dumb with astonishment. 

After this I could n’t resist the temptation of taking 
Johnny with me out to my farm, where we could load 
up old Cid’s wagon with enough wood to help them out 
a good bit with their winter’s fuel supply. Johnny’s 
mother, keeping alive for her boy, dependent on him, yet 
looking out for him, waiting up for him on the nights 
when the cows strayed far into the swamps, fearing, 
worrying—for to her he was always ‘‘the boy’’—en- 
couraging him in his regular duty to the village, be- 
lieved him to be as necessary to the town’s welfare as 
the butcher. Only a Skims W’hay Boy to be sure; but 
what ’s it to be a Skims butcher? Or the teller of the 
tale, for that matter? 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 269 


5 


PLAYING THE OnE-MAN SAw 


It was not a big boast to say that we lived in the best 
house in the Skims village. 

Well, right across the road from us was a poor 
old:tumble-down shed of a house where nothing but bats 
and spiders lived. Grass grew up through the cracks 
in the walk leading to the house, weeds filled the front 
yard, and bramble-roses were even growing out from 
the old window-ledges. 

You ’d think nobody would ever want to occupy such 
a woebegone, rickety shanty; but one day a family 
moved into this house. They had very little furniture, 
so that it didn’t take them long to move, and before 
they had been there a week they had a great pile of 
dried ash-trees from the swamps hauled up in front of 
the house. And presently we saw the Man of the One- 
Man Saw. 

He was four years old, that Man, doing his day’s 
work. Early one morning we heard a queer kind of 
wiggling and seraping going on outside, and on look- 
ing out to investigate we were met with the sight of 
this infant sawing wood with what I knew for a one- 
man saw, as I had one from the mail-order house just 
like it. Some one had put one of these long burnt-off 
ash-trees up on two improvised horses, with the ends 
loose, marked out for the One Man, and here he was, 
soberly sawing, inch by inch, all quiet by himself. 


270 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


Hour by hour the little fellow kept at it, day by 
day, chewing away at the ash logs with the one-man 
saw. It seemed to be his play, his work, his hobby, his 
life. He never smiled; once in a while he sang a tune- 
less little song to himself or gave soft little grunts, but 
that was all, as he kept right on sawing wood. 

Finally the thing got on my wife’s nerves, and she 
had to go over to the house across the road and investi- 
gate labor conditions. ‘‘Why,’’ she said, ‘‘here we have 
child labor and the sweat-shop and the slums right here 
at our very door, miles from the sound of any city. 
It’s terrible. I must see what sort of mother that 
child has.’’ 

She made her visit—her. Skims’ settlement work call, 
perhaps you ’d name it—and came back with a strange 
tale. 

‘‘That woman, the mother of the One Man, is the 
daughter of the Blind Man with the Blind Horse.”’ 

‘*What?’’ I exclaimed. 

‘Tt ’s true,’’ vowed my wife, grimly. 

I could hardly believe it, for it did n’t seem possible 
that such a forlorn and utterly useless person as the 
Blind Man with the Blind Horse could have the temer- 
ity to make himself responsible for bringing other beings 
into this hard world. I had seen the old man on my 
way to the onion-bed. He was truly the derelict of 
derelicts. 

The first time I had met him was just outside the 
village, and he had asked me how far he was from 
town. It seemed he had a certain sensitiveness to light 
and could make out whether objects were near or far 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 271 


off, but beyond that the world of light was a blank to 
him. And then to think of his having a blind horse! 
There he was, poor sightless beast, hitched to this rick- 
ety old wagon with a harness mended and patched all 
over with bits of hay-wire, a literal case of the blind 
leading the blind. Any merciful man with eyes would 
have brought the ancient nag to the end of his days 
ten years before. He had no teeth, so that he could n’t 
eat much, and he was gaunt and gray with years; but 
his master could n’t see him. He could feel him, to be 
sure, and called my attention to him rather proudly. 

‘So this is your horse?’’ I asked. And do you know 
that beast seemed to feel the compliment. I suppose he 
thought nobody would take him for a real horse, and he 
rather brightened up and pricked up his ears, standing 
here at attention, as if saying to himself, ‘‘ After all, I 
am a horse.’’ 

Other encounters got me better acquainted with the 
Blind Man with the Blind Horse, and I learned where 
and how he lived. Their home was an old abandoned 
log house out on the sand road, and a more dismal 
dwelling you could hardly hope to find. There was 
not a spear of grass in their front lawn, just shifting 
sand running down to the peat-bogs below. Back of the 
house was what pretended to be a garden, and there a 
few struggling pieces of corn and several thin potato- 
vines were fighting hard, just lke the people of the 
Skims, for an existence in the sands. 

Right down in the peat-bogs, however, where the black 
edges of the muck ran up against the sand-knoll, they 
had managed to start a little bed of onions and lettuce. 


272 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


This was all they had, except the Skims commons, where 
the cow and the blind horse might get a scanty living 
from saw-toothed grass, and perhaps a few spears of pre- 
cious blue-joint now and then. 

When my wife went over that day she got the story of 
the blind derelict’s daughter. 

Beyond the sand-knoll where the old squatter’s house 
stood, out of the cedar-swamp, came the only source of 
cash for the sand land squatters: railroad ties that 
brought ‘twenty-five cents apiece. 

And when the Blind Man’s daughter was thirteen, she 
said, she had learned to go out into the swamp mire to 
dig the sunken cedars and oaks lying half buried in 
muck and water. First, she had been obliged to meas- 
ure the log, for you know railroad ties have to be of 
regulation length and size; then she placed the saw for 
her blind father, and down in the bogs the two of them 
sawed away at the ends. Then came the hardest part: 
she had to trim the logs and drag them, heavy and — 
water-soaked as they were, out of the swamp and up 
the sand-hill above. All through her girlhood this cruel 
labor kept up, with the bitterness of wasted hauling and 
pulling from carrying logs that proved too thick at one 
end or otherwise unsatisfactory. In the two years when 
she was thirteen and fourteen, she said, they took out 
fifteen hundred ties from the swamp. 

The climax came, she said, one time when she had to 
drag out a particularly big tie. She could barely lift 
it, but under the threats of her father she managed to 
lug it along over her shoulder. She staggered with the 
dripping, slippery, slimy thing that would have been a 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 273 


load for a full-grown man, stepping from log to log, 
and bog to bog, dropping it a dozen times or more, vow- 
ing she couldn’t go on. But under her father’s curses 
and threats to kill her, she picked it up again each time, 
and finally pulled it to the sand. 

After that, she resolved to escape, and when she was 
not more than sixteen she married the first man who 
came along and so entered upon a new series of trage- 
dies. She had jumped from the frying-pan into the 
fire, for her husband was a loafer and a derelict, too, 
living about in the old deserted houses of the Skims, 
getting the barest living possible. Here she was, set- 
tled on a foundation of deficit in every respect, a 
derelict past behind her, a derelict future before her, 
and the One Man, who didn’t know the meaning of 
play. 

She had toiled fiercely all her life, and her worldly 
property was almost nil. She had a table, a chair, an 
old stove, a bed; that was about all. 

My wife just could n’t find it in her heart to speak 
to her about the One Man. Poor girl-wife, she never 
knew what play was herself; how should she be ex- 
pected to teach him? The children of the Skims must 
play a game of chance in being born, fortunate to have 
a one-man saw to pull and push. 


6 


He Never SQUEALED 


It was through the onion-bed that I got to know 
Friday. You see I hadn’t been out on the Skims 


274 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


long before I began to read up on onions in the 
Washington bulletins and in seed catalogues. I ’d been 
led to believe through these catalogues that from a 
small patch of land one could very soon raise enough 
money to become independently rich. The only competi- 
tor, I learned, was the chicken business, which, the bird 
fanciers induced me to believe, would be quicker. 

Any patch of land, my catalogues said, would grow 
two hundred bushels of onions to the acre; but if it 
were fairly well tended, it could be made five hundred; 
if unusual care were taken, with ordinary good luck in 
weather, the crop would increase to a thousand bushels 
to the acre. 

Then one could store them until midwinter or late 
spring and sell them for from one to two dollars a 
bushel. It was plain enough how one could become rich. 
Naturally, the problem of storage would hardly arise 
before I had grown the crop, and so I gave that little 
thought but directed all my energies toward finding a 
suitable onion ground. 

In the back of my mind, of course, I knew it was 
ridiculous to look for onion soil out here on the sands. 
Still, I reasoned, all the great deeds of the earth had 
been accomplished by attempting the impossible, and so 
why should I hesitate? I went out and looked. I came 
to the dry upland soil and eliminated it; I went down 
into the swale with its cattails and counted that out of 
my prospects. Then I went to the ridge overhanging the 
brook that was big enough to be called a river. I looked 
down, and there I saw the wide edges of the stream filled 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 275 


in with one mass of broken and tangled dead-brown 
goldenrod. 

‘*Here,’’ I said, ‘‘is my onion soil!’’ JI rushed down 
into the midst of the thickly interwoven mass with my 
hoe, turned up the soil, and found it a fine black alluvial 
mixture; five-hundred-bushel onion acre land without 
doubt! Up and down the bank I rushed, computing the 
number of possible inches I could set out into onions. 
Before I started home that night I was a rich man; 
rich enough, almost, to buy back the precious boon of 
sleep. | 

The next morning, bright and early, I had my old 
horse The Cid down with a plow, digging into the 
goldenrod bed. We began with light hearts, for we 
knew not with what we had to contend. There was a 
leather covering of goldenrod roots an inch thick, form- 
ing a regular rhinoceros-hide blanket all over the fine 
black onion soil. 

Well, old Cid and I went on plowing, ripping up that 
leather hide, until we had it all cut in strips, like the 
fringe of a deerskin Indian robe. I stopped The Cid 
and took a survey of the goldenrod bed, all ruthlessly cut 
up, and wondered about my onions. For one thing, I 
decided The Cid was of no more use for the time, and so 
I loosed him to wander and feed on dead grass and re- 
turned to the scene of action with a pitchfork. 

Then for days I pitchforked the leather roots off the 
land, keeping at it so long that I got to be quite philo- 
sophical. ‘‘This is mighty fortunate,’’ I said, ‘‘having 
this goldenrod here. I ’ll just heap all this leather up 


276 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


and make a regular Dutch dike of it, so the river won’t 
come over.’’ Accordingly I worked day after day, 
pitchforking and banking and raking, until there was n’t 
a twig or a root left; not an indication of what had been. 
And it was the finest soil you ever saw, like meal! I’d 
take it up in my hand and wish that it were spread out 
all over my two forties. 

It was so workable that I easily got it into condition 
for my onion-bed. I had sent to the seed house and got 
that peculiar variety guaranteed to grow a thousand 
bushels to the acre, several pounds of seed in all, I 
believe. Then I made a marker out of ash and sowed 
every bit of that seed by hand on that half-acre, more or 
less. For a man who must n’t overwork, bending down 
over one of those little furrows, dribbling the small 
seeds out between thumb and finger one by one, back 
and forth across the plot, days and days, was quite a 
task. 

However, all the sowing and careful covering were as 
nothing beside the satisfaction I had of thinking that 
away back there on the Skims, where one would least 
expect it, I had found an onion gold-mine whose profits 
were sure to be enormous. I could hardly wait for the 
onions to come up. My wife and I would go down and 
stand on the ridge above the river, looking below on 
the fine black onion soil winding around the bend in 
the river, peering for the sight of the first green tops 
and dreaming of the wealth to come. 

Finally they began to come up, and when we could see 
the clean green rows we felt that our seed was good 
and our bushels to the acre assured. When the onions 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 277% 


were up four inches high, however, there came a steady 
downpour of rain for three days. Then it took a day 
off and started in again. By and by it occurred to me 
to wonder how my onion-bed was getting on. So I 
drove The Cid down to the bridge to have a look, and 
there the rain had pooled, and the swollen brook river 
had seeped in through my leather dike, until every one of 
the dollar-a-bushel onions was under water. The bright 
green rows of young things looked up at me from the 
bottom of the pools, and I had my first taste of defeat 
as a farmer. 

I went home with a sad tale of disaster, and was not 
to be comforted until the rain stopped and the flood 
subsided, and the green shoots. a little jaundiced, began 
to emerge. Hope came on again, and in the end two 
thirds of my onions came safe through the storm. Then 
followed a season of hot sultry weather, and another big 
surprise, awaiting me, came to pass. 

Among my onions suddenly appeared everywhere 
fuzzy green stuff, the tiny goldenrods. I had neglected 
to take into account a hundred years of goldenrod seeds. 
As a result in a few days my onions were so overtopped 
that I could n’t see them at all, and I knew that the time 
of weeding had come. I started in bravely. I was still 
on my first row when right near me I heard an ominous 
*“Buzz-2e!’’ and there by my feet was a monster rattler, 
the first one I ’d ever seen or heard; and now, added to 
my terrors by night, was the buzz of the rattler, for 
which I prepared by sharpening hoes at intervals all 
night long. I never moved about the Skims after that 
without having my ear sharply attuned for the rattle of 


278 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


warning, and never without carrying my hoe filed to a 
razor edge. 

But I went on my lonesome way, weeding and pulling 
row after row, with the weeds growing faster all the 
time, so that I could n’t keep up, and I saw my thousand 
dwindle to eight hundred and then to four hundred and 
almost out of sight, until I found my man Friday. 

The first day I saw Friday he was fishing. He was 
about the oddest-looking dried-up little mortal I had 
ever seen, sitting up there on the high bridge in his old 
patched clothes, layer on layer of patches, stratum on 
stratum; you might even have called them geological 
garments, such was their stratified variety. 

‘‘Catching trout?’’ I called to him. 

‘*No,’’ said he, showing me a basket of little fishes 
about four inches long. 

‘‘Pretty discouraging, fishing for such small fry, is n’t 
it?’’ I asked. 

He looked up at me in a puzzled fashion and then 
made a speech short but very full of meaning, ‘‘Oh, 
dat ’s all right!’’ 

‘“Where do you live?’’ I asked. 

‘Up in the corner,’’ and he pointed with his thumb 
back to the deserted village in which there were only 
two wooden shelters standing. 

An idea occurred to me suddenly. ‘‘How would you 
like to work on shares in this onion-bed with me?’’ I 
asked. 

He looked up interested. 

‘‘T "ll give you a third of all we harvest,’’ I offered, 
longing for company and partnership. 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 279 


To my delight, Friday agreed to this proposition, and 
so, after he had put up his fish and pole, he got into 
the wagon with me and went down to see the onion- 
bed. He didn’t say much, but I could see that he was 
very much pleased with the onions and delighted to be 
able to help. 

It was Friday when I found him; so in Crusoe fashion 
I called him my Man Friday. Early on Saturday morn- 
ing he was on hand to weed, and every morning when 
I arrived at eight he was there with his little basket, 
busily weeding. That basket was one mystery about 
Friday I never solved. I never saw him take anything 
out of it nor yet put anything in, but it was always with 
him. 

But after a while Friday didn’t get down to the 
onion-patch so early, and I ’d stop for him as I drove 
down. As I sat there in my wagon waiting for him 
mornings, I began to notice what was going on around 
his shanty. Sometimes I ’d find him out tending his 
garden, made up of two small potato-patches, one under 
the side window and the other out in front where a 
flower-garden would naturally have been placed. At 
other times I saw Friday out with a scythe, and I 
noticed a little stack of hay, about six feet in diameter, 
out in his yard. Once, when I discovered him coming 
up over the hill, a bundle of hay tied around with a 
piece of hay-wire and slung over his back, I questioned 
him. 

**Oh, yes,’’ he said, ‘‘cut a little hay by the river.”’ 

Day by day this stack of Friday’s grew until it was 
nicely rounded, and then one day it disappeared. Fri- 


280 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


day had sold it, but he straightway grew another, care- 
fully garnering every blade of grass from the peat-bogs 
and river bottoms. And he worked just as hard to get 
his fuel, for the wood had been cleared off for half a 
mile around the town. The Old Woman with the Clay 
Pipe and the Wheelbarrow had seen to that, and Friday 
had no cart; so I ’d see him some mornings come up from 
the swamps with a stub over his shoulder. 

‘‘Pretty hard work, isn’t it?’’ I asked. 

‘*Oh, dat ’s all right,’’ said he. 

Then when I ’d question him he ’d tell me about Fin- 
land. Finland and the onions were the only two sub- 
jects he would ever brighten up about. He told me of 
the midnight sun and the northern lights. He described 
the beautiful fields of oats and grass, and explained how 
the women of Finland gather into bundles the tender 
branches of bush and tree, that in the winter they may 
soften them with soaking and feed as fodder for their 
cattle. 

No, Friday never smiled. He seemed to have forgot- 
ten how. His face, a grim yellow leather stoic mask with 
sunken curves, never lighted up with any thrill at all. I 
wondered what had ever happened to the man to make 
him like this, and on inquiry discovered that he had 
lumbered on the Skims in its rollicking days when the 
lumber boom was on. Now he had no acquaintances at 
all, except a few old lumber men, one of whom kept a 
saloon up in the town proper. Not a friend in America, 
relatives all in far-off Finland, and he a stranded dere- 
lict alone here living on little fishes—enough to make 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND 281 


any man despair. But not so.Friday. He was pure 
grit. 

‘Good morning,’’ I ’d say. ‘‘How are you?”’’ 

**Oh, dat ’s all right,’’ he would answer. 

Then one morning I added my favorite question, 
**How do you sleep ?”’ 

*‘Don’t sleep,’’ he replied. 

‘“What ’s the matter?’’ said I, eagerly. 

‘*Oh,’’ he said, ‘‘I ’ve got hell right here,’’ and poor 
Friday laid his hand on the pit of his stomach. 

I became interested, for sleep was the burning question 
in life tome. ‘‘Don’t you sleep any ?’’ I inquired. 

‘Well, not much. Walk around the room hour after 
hour all night mostly.’’ 

After this each morning I greeted him with the in- 
quiry so often put by my friends to me, ‘‘ Well, how ’d 
you sleep ?’’ 

‘*Walked till three o’clock,’’ he ’d say. He didn’t 
know what was the matter with him. All he knew was 
that he had hell in him. 

He didn’t talk much and never complained, but I 
figured it out that he had been a hard drinker when he 
was a lumberman, and that probably the stuff had eaten 
the lining out of his stomach. So here he was living on 
little minnows and hanging on for dear life. 

Back and forth to the onion-patch, Friday and I 
went, until it became evident that Friday was going 
less and less each day. But even with his hell burning 
on worse than ever his spirit was right up tight; he was 
going to see the thing through. I was deeply touched 


282 RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


by Friday’s Finnish pluck. Here was a man, a fel- 
low-traveler in life, almost duplicating my own ex- 
perience. He was doing the thing that was more than 
I was doing. He was a derelict lumberman, stranded. 
The wealthy man who had exploited the land was giv- 
ing statues to his city; the saloon man who had fed 
Friday the whisky had friends—he could intoxicate him- 
self on friendship; but here was Friday, alone and 
friendless, standing in the last old lumber-shack, fight- 
ing single-handed a losing fight. 

What could I have done in a position like that, erawl- 
ing up the ridge with an old stub to keep me warm, 
gathering hay, straw by straw? Here was I with my 
wife, my family, my friends, all standing by me, and 
I was not doing half so well, not putting up half the 
fight. Yes, indeed, Friday had a right to my sym- 
pathy, if ever a man had, and I ’d have done more for 
him, but I could n’t trust my own miserable strength. 

But the time came, at length, when we gathered in 
the onion crop and shared it. We had had to give up 
half the plot as hopelessly weedy, but the other half had 
brought forth some fine onions. I remember well our 
pride as we harvested them and took up Friday’s two 
big loads to his house and put them in a great pile 
on the floor in his bare room. For miles around, the 
people had grown to call me the Onion Man, but I cared 
little for this taint on my name, as I looked that day at 
the great onion pile and Friday’s face, as he said, al- 
most pleased, for once, ‘‘Oh, dat ’s all right.’’ 

From that time on, Friday didn’t work for me, but 
as I drove by his shanty I was always anxious to see 


THE SKIMS: A SUBMARGINAL LAND) 283 


some indication that he was up and around, and if I 
did n’t see the scythe out, or his bait can or hoe, [I al- 
ways stopped in a moment to inquire about the sleep. 

But in spite of my hopes, things were steadily going 
from bad to worse with Friday. It came Christmas- 
time, and my wife put up a basket for me to take to 
him, with oysters and one thing and another. He 
was n’t around outside the house when I went into the 
yard, and as the door was open, I went in. I ’ve seen 
dirtier places than Friday’s bare house, but never in all 
my life have I seen as wretched a spot. It was abso- 
lutely barren. An old Finnish Bible was the only evi- 
dence of better days. Friday was sitting on a bed cov- 
ered with some sort of sheepskin or hide; not a vestige 
of real bedclothes was to be seen. 

‘*Merry Christmas!’’ I said. ‘‘How are you?”’ 

**Oh, dat ’s all right,’’ he slowly replied. 

I looked around. ‘‘But you have hardly enough wood 
to last you a week!’’ I said. 

**Oh, dat ’s all right.’’ 

I made a little fire, and then I showed him the things 
I 7d brought. He seemed pleased. While I was there, 
the saloon-keeper from town came in. He tried to be a 
little jocular but did n’t sueceed, for when he mentioned 
whisky Friday merely shook his head and said he did n’t 
take it any more. It was evident that Friday was on his 
last legs. I spoke with the saloon-keeper outside Fri- 
day’s door a moment when we had started to leave. 

‘‘The man,’’ he said, ‘‘is simply dying there. He 
can’t get out for more wood.’’ 

I was forced to agree that he was right. And there 


284: RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 


was nothing I could do for him. So on Christmas day 
we made arrangements for a sleigh to come and take 
Friday to the county house. Just as soon as things 
came easy, and he no longer had to carry limbs and 
stubs for a fire, his motive in life was taken away, and so 
he drooped, and light left his eyes. 

When he realized that we understood, he said: ‘‘Oh, 
dat ’s all right. I never squealed.’’ 

No one will ever make me think that Friday lived in 
vain. He certainly was an unaccountable fleck of cream 
floating on the Skims. 


INDEX 


Adjustments backward, 8, 10 

Advantages of farm life, health, 
169; service, 170; home, 
171; career for women, 175 

‘Americanism, bad, 155 

Aping city ways, 48, 50 

Art, a new rural, 200; a foun- 
dation for, 208 


Bonded debt, farm and city, 
143 


Carnegie libraries, 132 

Cement walks, 63 

Census, U. S., 4; tenancy in, 
77; utilizing, 107, 109; on 
children under ten years of 
age, 147 

Chaffey Union High School, 97 

Clothes, social, 38 

Consolidation, of trade agen- 
cies, 72 

County, 145 


Democracy, American, 5; re- 
melted, 209; of occupa- 
tions, 211] 

Demonstration agents, 48 

Denmark, folk-schools, 245 

Depression, agricultural, 
182 


181, 


Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 197 


Farm children, asset, 19 


Farmer, as traditionalist, 21; 
as teleologist, 22; his cau- 
tion, 24; resigned to mini- 
mums, 25; his thrift, 25; 
as individualist, 26; new 
type of, 30 

Farm home, _ unlike 
homes, 15, 16, 17 

Farming, a unique occupation, 
13 

Folk-ways, 31 

Frontier, American, 4; circular 
line, 6; retarded, 6, 7 


other 


Garden, economics of, 57; es- 
theties of, 59 
Groups, post-office, 9 


Hands, protection of, 62 

High school, farmers’, 96 

Highways, rural, 47; a system 
of, 74 

Hospitals, rural, 111; key to 
rural health, 113; ambu- 
lance service of, 117 

Housing, for colored people, 35 


Income, farm, 139; city, 140 


Land, agricultural, 6, 7, 8; ur- 
ban, 6, 7; title to, 91 
Landlords, 77; country gentle- 
man, 78; land speculator, 
79; functions of, 83; 

abuses of function of, 86 


285 


286 


Living, furnished -by farm, 43; 
purchased, 44; a sure, 167 


. 


Mail-order trade, 71° 
Missions, Christian, 127 
Monopolizing the city, 160 
Mount Vernon, farm-house of 
Washington, 247 
Municipality, community type, 
213; role of, 215; commu- 
nity house, 220; a cooper- 
ative, 222; plan of, 223 


Peasant farming, 32 

Peasant society, 11 

Population, farm, 134; move- 
ments of, 183-195 

Property, farm, 136; city, 137, 
138 

Psychology, of dwellings, 161; 
of business, 161 


Record, distributing hours, 54; 
sheet, 55; chart, 56 
Religion, rural, 123; the Bible 
and, 123; debt of urban 
church to, 125 
Replanning, the city, 150 
Retail merchandising, 
methods of, 70 


46; 


Sects, Christian, 128 
Smith-Hughes Law, 95; teach- 
ers, 99, 102, 103, 104 

Soil survey, 106 


INDEX 
Standard of living, 33; Ameri- 


ean, 34; for animals, 35; 
the idea of, 37; dollar 
measure, 40, 41; high, fa- 
voring production, 45; 
high, favoring domestic 
markets, 46; low, favoring 
migration, 47 

Streets, perils of, 155 

Submarginal, land, 251; people, 
269 

Suburban, movement, 157’: 
room for city dwellers, 162 

Surplus, draining to city, 92 


Taxes, farm, 140; city, 141 

Tenancy, by-products of, 90 

Tenants, farm, 80; related to 
landlord, 80; unrelated to 
landlord, 81; capitalist, 
82; functions of, 85; 
abuses of function of, 86; 
poverty of, 88 

Thaer, Albrecht, 202 

Town, farmers’, 75 

Township, 144 

Trading-post, 8 


Villages, trade agencies of, 68; 
killed, 73; American and 
European, 206 


Wash-up room, 61 
Work day, shortening, 51 


Zoning cities, 158 


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